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I might be suspicious of “Give Jerry a $3263958374 raise,” but that would launch an interesting hunt as to what property they were exactly mining for.
by pclmulqdq 3y ago
I might be suspicious of “Give Jerry a $3263958374 raise,” but that would launch an interesting hunt as to what property they were exactly mining for.
- tptacek 3y agoFor the reason stated in the article, it's actually pretty likely that there's a counter in there somewhere. A 31-bit number like "3263958374" doesn't seem especially interesting cryptographically.
- kadoban 3y agoThe counter is described as the minimum value that will fit the pattern and make the result a prime. So that should be easily checkable and not really add any free variables. If you were evil and motivated you'd probably want to hide your variables in the innocent looking part, the simple English or the punctuation, instead.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoYeah, that counter is separate from a counter embedded in an ASCII string. The one thing that kind of string indicates is that it almost certainly wasn't the first string they tried.