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55-496: GIMPS was founded in 1996 by George Woltman , who also wrote the Prime95 client and its Linux port MPrime. Scott Kurowski wrote the back end PrimeNet server to demonstrate volunteer computing software by Entropia, a company he founded in 1997. GIMPS is registered as Mersenne Research, Inc. with Kurowski as Executive Vice President and board director. GIMPS is said to be one of the first large scale volunteer computing projects over

110-520: A Fermat pseudoprime that is not prime is vastly lower than the error rate of the Lucas-Lehmer test due to computer hardware errors .) In September 2020, GIMPS began to support primality proofs based on verifiable delay functions. The proof files are generated while the Fermat primality test is in progress. These proofs, together with an error-checking algorithm devised by Robert Gerbicz, provide

165-562: A beginners' how-to manual by contracted technical writer Adam Gaffin, and made available for free download in many formats. MIT Press published it in paperback form in 1994 as Everybody's Guide to the Internet ( ISBN   9780262571050 ). The online edition was updated regularly throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and translated into dozens of languages. The organization's second book, Protecting Yourself Online ( ISBN   9780062515124 ), an overview of digital civil liberties,

220-473: A complete confidence in the correctness of the test result and eliminate the need for double checks. First-time Lucas-Lehmer tests were deprecated in April 2021. GIMPS also has sub-projects to factor known composite Mersenne and Fermat numbers . The project began in early January 1996, with a program that ran on i386 computers. The name for the project was coined by Luke Welsh, one of its earlier searchers and

275-559: A growing social crisis: Future Shock. America was entering the Information Age with neither laws nor metaphors for the appropriate protection and conveyance of information itself." Barlow felt that to confront this a formal organization would be needed; he hired Cathy Cook as press coordinator, and began to set up what would become the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation

330-558: A major milestone after all exponents below 100 million were checked at least once. From its inception until 2018, the project relied primarily on the Lucas–Lehmer primality test as it is an algorithm that is both specialized for testing Mersenne primes and particularly efficient on binary computer architectures . Before applying it to a given Mersenne number, there was a trial division phase, used to rapidly eliminate many Mersenne numbers with small factors. Pollard's p − 1 algorithm

385-580: A paper describing it. More recently, the organization has been involved in defending Edward Felten , Jon Lech Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov . The organization was originally located at Mitch Kapor's Kapor Enterprises offices in Boston. By the fall of 1993, the main EFF offices were consolidated into a single office in Washington DC, headed by Executive Director Jerry Berman. During this time, some of

440-423: A possible prime is reported to the server, it is verified first (by one or more independent tests on different machines) before being announced. The importance of this was illustrated in 2003, when a false positive was reported to the server as being a Mersenne prime but verification failed. The official "discovery date" of a prime is the date that a human first noticed the result for the prime, which may differ from

495-695: A programmer for Data General . This biographical article relating to a computer specialist is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation ( EFF ) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California . It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties . It provides funds for legal defense in court, presents amicus curiae briefs, defends individuals and new technologies from what it considers abusive legal threats, works to expose government malfeasance, provides guidance to

550-522: A replacement for DES. The EFF is a leading supporter of the Email Privacy Act . The EFF regularly brings and defends lawsuits at all levels of the US legal system in pursuit of its goals and objectives. The EFF has long taken a stance against strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) as attempts to stymie free speech and advocated for effective anti-SLAPP legislation. Many of

605-445: A set of seven specific criteria ranging from whether messages were encrypted in transit to whether or not the code had been recently audited." As of April 21, 2017 , a revised version is under development. As of 2021, Charity Navigator has given the EFF an overall rating of four out of four stars, including four stars for its financial efficiency and capacity. In 2011, the EFF received $ 1 million from Google as part of

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660-401: A settlement of a class action related to privacy issues involving Google Buzz . The Electronic Privacy Information Center and seven other privacy-focused nonprofits protested that the plaintiffs' lawyers and Google had, in effect, arranged to give the majority of those funds "to organizations that are currently paid by Google to lobby for or to consult for the company". An additional $ 1 million

715-515: A sustained average aggregate throughput of approximately 4.71  PetaFLOPS (or PFLOPS) . In November 2012, GIMPS maintained 95 TFLOPS, theoretically earning the GIMPS virtual computer a rank of 330 among the TOP500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The preceding place was then held by an 'HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c G7' of Hewlett-Packard . As of July 2021 TOP500 results,

770-441: Is a major section of its main website at EFF.org. The EFF sent a video message of support to global grassroots movement CryptoParty . EFF's How to Fix the Internet podcast won a 2024 Anthem Award . The EFF has developed some software and browser add-ons, including Switzerland , HTTPS Everywhere , and Privacy Badger . The EFF conducted a project named Secure Messaging Scorecard which "evaluated apps and tools based on

825-414: Is also used to search for smooth factors. In 2018, GIMPS adopted a Fermat primality test with basis a=3as an alternative option for primality testing, while keeping the Lucas-Lehmer test as a double-check for Mersenne numbers detected as probable primes by the Fermat test. (While the Lucas-Lehmer test is deterministic and the Fermat test is only probabilistic, the probability of the Fermat test finding

880-556: Is designed to quickly document irregularities and instances of voter suppression as they occur on an election day. The EFF was active in the 2016 United States presidential election because of online phishing related to the controversy over fabrication of election results. J. Alex Halderman , a computer security professor at the University of Michigan , wrote an article that was published in Medium in 2016 stating he thought it

935-704: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and eventually returned to the ACLU). Not long before EFF's move into new offices at 454 Shotwell St. in SF's Mission District, Mike Godwin departed, long-time Legal Director Shari Steele was appointed executive director, and staff attorney Cindy Cohn became the legal director. In the spring of 2006, the EFF announced the opening of an office again in Washington, D.C., with two new staff attorneys. In 2012,

990-549: The EFF DES cracker (nicknamed Deep Crack), using special purpose hardware and software and costing $ 210,000. This brought the record for breaking a message down to 56 hours on 17 July 1998 and to under 24 hours on 19 January 1999 (in conjunction with distributed.net ). The EFF published the plans and source code for the cracker. Within four years the Advanced Encryption Standard was standardized as

1045-557: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a degree in computer science. He lives in North Carolina . His mathematical libraries created for the GIMPS project are the fastest known for multiplication of large integers , and are used by other distributed computing projects as well, such as Seventeen or Bust . He also worked on a TTL version of Maze War while a student at MIT. Later he worked as

1100-560: The United States Patent and Trademark Office . The EFF has long been an advocate of paper audit trails for voting machines and testified in support of them after the 2004 United States presidential election . Later, it funded the research of Hariprasad Vemuru who exposed vulnerabilities in a particular model. Since 2008, the EFF has operated the Our Vote Live website and database. Staffed by hotline volunteers, it

1155-486: The 35th. As of November 14, 2023, 65,723,341 is the largest exponent below which all other prime exponents have been checked twice, so it is not verified whether any undiscovered Mersenne primes exist between the 48th (M 57885161 ) and the 51st (M 82589933 ) on this chart; the ranking is therefore provisional. Furthermore, 114,055,847 is the largest exponent below which all other prime exponents have been tested at least once, so all Mersenne numbers below

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1210-582: The 51st (M 82589933 ) have been tested. The number M 136279841 has 41,024,320 decimal digits. To help visualize the size of this number, if it were to be saved to disk, the resulting text file would be nearly 42 megabytes long (most books in plain text format are under two megabytes). A standard word processor layout (50 lines per page, 75 digits per line) would require 10,940 pages to display it. If one were to print it out using standard printer paper, single-sided, it would require approximately 22 reams (22 × 500 = 11000 sheets) of paper. Whenever

1265-499: The EFF Pioneer Awards, are awarded annually to recognize individuals who in its opinion are "leaders who are extending freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier." In 2017, the honorees were Chelsea Manning , Mike Masnick and Annie Game. The EFF Cooperative Computing Awards are a series of four awards meant "to encourage ordinary Internet users to contribute to solving huge scientific problems", to be awarded to

1320-796: The EFF and 56 other digital advocacy organizations called for internet infrastructure providers to stop policing the content of the websites they service. The organizations argued that many providers can only moderate content by revoking access to an entire website, leaving end-users with little transparency or recourse. They expressed concern that governments may pressure infrastructure providers to deny service to opponents and marginalized groups, and that monopolistic infrastructure providers may take banned users offline altogether. The coalition believes that platforms and user-facing websites are better-positioned as moderators, because they can remove specific content, sanction accounts granularly, and offer reasoning and appeals for moderation decisions. The initiative

1375-475: The EFF began a fundraising campaign for the renovation of a building located at 815 Eddy Street in San Francisco, to serve as its new headquarters. The move was completed in April 2013. On April 1, 2015, Shari Steele stepped down as executive director. Cindy Cohn became the new executive director, Corynne McSherry became the legal director, and Kurt Opsahl became the general counsel. By the mid-1990s

1430-477: The EFF was becoming seriously concerned about the refusal of the US government to license any secure encryption product for export unless it used key recovery and claims that governments could not decrypt information when protected by Data Encryption Standard (DES), continuing even after the public breaking of the code in the first of the DES Challenges . They coordinated and supported the construction of

1485-489: The EFF's attention focused on influencing national policy , to the dislike of some of the members of the organization. In 1994, Berman parted ways with the EFF and formed the Center for Democracy and Technology , while Drew Taubman briefly took the reins as executive director. In 1995, under the auspices of Executive Director Lori Fena , after some downsizing and in an effort to regroup and refocus on their base of support,

1540-413: The Internet for research purposes. As of October 2024, the project has found a total of eighteen Mersenne primes, sixteen of which were the largest known prime number at their respective times of discovery. The largest known prime as of October 2024 is 2 − 1 (or M 136,279,841 for short) and was discovered on October 12, 2024, by Luke Durant. On December 4, 2020, the project passed

1595-700: The United States at about that time as part of a state–federal task force called Operation Sundevil . GURPS Cyberpunk , one of the game company's projects, was mistakenly labeled as a handbook for computer crime, and the Secret Service raided the offices of Steve Jackson Games. The search warrant for the raid was deemed hastily issued, and the games company soon after claimed unauthorized access as well as tampering of their emails. While phone calls were protected by legislation, digital emails were an early concept and had not been considered to fall under

1650-437: The amount of regulation on social media were open to abuse. Also in 2019, the EFF launched the website " TOSsed out" to document cases of moderation rules being applied inconsistently. Cindy Cohn underscored their commitment to upholding free speech online, writing that "once you've turned it on, whether through pressure or threats of lawsuits, the power to silence people doesn't just go in one direction." In December 2022,

1705-537: The areas relating to digital speech and the extension of the Constitution into Cyberspace." This generated further reaction and support for the ideas of Barlow and Kapor. In late June, Barlow held a series of dinners in San Francisco with major figures in the computer industry to develop a coherent response to these perceived threats. Barlow considered that: "The actions of the FBI and Secret Service were symptoms of

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1760-522: The co-discoverer of the 29th Mersenne prime. Within a few months, several dozen people had joined, and over a thousand by the end of the first year. Joel Armengaud, a participant, discovered the primality of M 1,398,269 on November 13, 1996. Since then, GIMPS has discovered a new Mersenne prime every 1 to 2 years on average. However, the most recent largest prime found in October 2024 took nearly six years to find. As of July 2022, GIMPS has

1815-424: The current GIMPS numbers would no longer make the list. Previously, this was approximately 50 TFLOPS in early 2010, 30 TFLOPS in mid-2008, 20 TFLOPS in mid-2006, and 14 TFLOPS in early 2004. Although the GIMPS software's source code is publicly available, technically it is not free software , since it has a restriction that users must abide by the project's distribution terms. Specifically, if

1870-538: The date that the result was first reported to the server. For example, M 74207281 was reported to the server on September 17, 2015, but the report was overlooked until January 7, 2016. George Woltman George Woltman (born November 10, 1957) is the founder of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a distributed computing project researching Mersenne prime numbers using his software Prime95 . He graduated from

1925-566: The director of the original office, and in December 1992, Jerry Berman became the acting executive director of the organization as a whole, based in a new second office. The creation of the organization was motivated by the massive search and seizure on Steve Jackson Games executed by the United States Secret Service early in 1990. Similar but officially unconnected law-enforcement raids were being conducted across

1980-408: The first individual or group who discovers a prime number with a significant record number of decimal digits. The awards are funded by an anonymous donor. The awards are: EFF publishes through several outlets such as the online periodical EFFector , as well as its websites, blogs, and on social networking services. EFF's first book was published in 1993 as The Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet ,

2035-541: The government and courts , organizes political action and mass mailings, supports some new technologies which it believes preserve personal freedoms and online civil liberties, maintains a database and web sites of related news and information, monitors and challenges potential legislation that it believes would infringe on personal liberties and fair use , and solicits a list of what it considers are abusive patents with intentions to defeat those that it considers are without merit . The Electronic Frontier Foundation

2090-618: The most significant technology law cases have involved the EFF, including MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. , Apple v. Does , and others. The EFF represented the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive . Following the COVID-19 pandemic , the Internet Archive introduced a digital book borrowing system which allows users to borrow digital copies of physical books the archive had in its physical location. The case

2145-467: The organization moved offices to San Francisco, California . There, it took up temporary residence at John Gilmore's Toad Hall, and soon afterward moved into the Hamm's Building at 1550 Bryant St. After Fena moved onto the EFF board of directors for a while, the organization was led briefly by Tara Lemmey , followed by Barry Steinhardt (who had come from the closely allied Technology and Liberty Program at

2200-455: The right to change this EULA without notice and with reasonable retroactive effect . " All Mersenne primes are of the form M p = 2 − 1 , where p is a prime number itself. The smallest Mersenne prime in this table is 2 − 1. The first column is the rank of the Mersenne prime in the (ordered) sequence of all Mersenne primes; GIMPS has found all known Mersenne primes beginning with

2255-442: The right to personal privacy. The Steve Jackson Games case was the EFF's first high-profile case, was the major rallying point around which the EFF began promoting computer- and Internet-related civil liberties. The EFF's second big case was Bernstein v. United States led by Cindy Cohn , in which programmer and professor Daniel J. Bernstein sued the government for permission to publish his encryption software, Snuffle, and

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2310-533: The software is used to discover a prime number with at least 100,000,000 decimal digits, the user will only win $ 50,000 of the $ 150,000 prize offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation . On the other hand, they will win $ 3,000 when discovering a smaller prime not qualifying for the prize. Third-party programs for testing Mersenne numbers, such as Mlucas and Glucas (for non-x86 systems), do not have this restriction. GIMPS also "reserves

2365-611: The spring of 2018, the EFF joined the Open Technology Institute (OTI), the Center for Democracy & Technology , the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and four academics in writing The Santa Clara Principles: On Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation . The document sets out the following guidelines for social networks. Six months later, the same organizations sought

2420-620: The support of roughly 80 others, including Article 19 , in calling for Facebook to adopt the Santa Clara Principles. This was later updated with a request for Facebook to warn users who have interacted with sock puppet law enforcement accounts. In 2019, the EFF and OTI delivered testimony about the Online Harms White Paper in the United Kingdom. They commented that several proposals to increase

2475-543: The target of Secret Service raids. This generated a large amount of publicity which led to offers of financial support from John Gilmore and Steve Wozniak . Barlow and Kapor continued to research conflicts between the government and technology and in June 1990, Barlow posted online the influential article titled "Crime & Puzzlement" in which Barlow announced his and Kapor's plans to create an organization to "raise and disburse funds for education, lobbying, and litigation in

2530-555: The theft and distribution of the source code for a series of Macintosh ROMs. Barlow described the visit as "complicated by [the agent's] fairly complete unfamiliarity with computer technology. I realized right away that before I could demonstrate my innocence, I would first have to explain to him what guilt might be." Barlow felt that his experience was symptomatic of a "great paroxysm of governmental confusion during which everyone's liberties would become at risk". Barlow posted an account of this experience to The WELL online community and

2585-404: Was advisable to have a recount on some of the election results from states like Wisconsin , Michigan , and Pennsylvania , exclusively states Hillary Clinton lost. In retaliation against Halderman, a hacker sent anti-Semitic and racist emails to students at University of Michigan signed from Halderman. The EFF publicizes these controversies and promotes the reduction of online phishing. In

2640-415: Was contacted by Mitch Kapor, who had had a similar experience. The pair agreed that there was a need to defend civil liberties on the Internet. Kapor agreed to fund any legal fees associated with such a defense and the pair contacted New York lawyers Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky and Lieberman about defending several computer hackers from a Harper's magazine forum on computers and freedom who had been

2695-437: Was formally founded on July 10, 1990, by Kapor and Barlow, who very soon after elected Gilmore, Wozniak, and Stewart Brand to join them on the board of directors. Initial funding was provided by Kapor, Wozniak, and an anonymous benefactor. In 1990, Mike Godwin joined the organization as its first staff counsel. Then in 1991, Esther Dyson and Jerry Berman joined the EFF board of directors. By 1992, Cliff Figallo became

2750-504: Was formed in July 1990 by John Gilmore , John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor in response to a series of actions by law enforcement agencies that led them to conclude that the authorities were gravely uninformed about emerging forms of online communication, and that there was a need for increased protection for Internet civil liberties . In April 1990, Barlow had been visited by a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in relation to

2805-544: Was launched in the wake of Drop Kiwi Farms , a campaign that convinced several internet service providers and DDoS protection firms to revoke service to Kiwi Farms , a controversial forum. After the forum returned behind an open-source bot detection tool, the EFF stopped classifying DDoS protection services as infrastructure because they cannot determine whether a website stays online or not. The EFF organizes two sets of awards to promote work in accordance with its goals and objectives. The EFF Awards, until 2022 called

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2860-598: Was obtained from Facebook in a similar settlement. The agitprop art group Psychological Industries has independently issued buttons with pop culture tropes such as the logo of the Laughing Man from the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (with the original The Catcher in the Rye quotation replaced with the slogan of Anonymous ), a bleeding roller derby jammer , and

2915-477: Was produced in 2015 as part of EFF's 25th anniversary activities, and includes contributions from 22 writers, including Charlie Jane Anders , Paolo Bacigalupi , Lauren Beukes , David Brin , Pat Cadigan , Cory Doctorow , Neil Gaiman , Eileen Gunn , Kameron Hurley , James Patrick Kelly , Ramez Naam , Annalee Newitz , Hannu Rajaniemi , Rudy Rucker , Lewis Shiner , Bruce Sterling , and Charles Yu . The Electronic Frontier Foundation's blog , DeepLinks ,

2970-451: Was won by Hachette and the Internet Archive being forced to stop its digital book borrowing system. The Patent Busting Project is an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) initiative challenging patents that the organization describes as illegitimate and suppress innovation or limit online expression. The initiative launched on April 19, 2004, and involves two phases: documenting the damage caused by these patents, and submitting challenges to

3025-445: Was written in 1998 by technical writer Robert B. Gelman and EFF Communications Director Stanton McCandlish, and published by HarperCollins . A third book, Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics & Chip Design ( ISBN   9781565925205 ), focusing on EFF's DES Cracker project, was published the same year by O'Reilly Media . A digital book, Pwning Tomorrow , an anthology of speculative fiction ,

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