Chaos, cracking passwords one spare cycle at a time

So you want to put your old computer to work on a distributed-computing project but your altrustism is too tapped for folding@home, you're not enough a beliver for seti@home, and you're not feeling cipherpunky enough for distributed.net. Well, lucky you there's Chaos, a 6MB Linux-based bootable CD that will turn that lazy spare box of yours into a lean, mean, hash-cracking brute-forcing grid-computing machine. Maybe you can even use that extra horsepower to give back to the security firm who developed Chaos, Pure Hacking, in their efforts to crack passwords for their clients? Who knows, yours could be the node that figures out Sir Howard Stringer's password is his dog's name.

[Via Wired News]