M4 Breakers

The M4 Project is an effort to break 3 original Enigma messages with the help of distributed computing. The signals were intercepted in the North Atlantic in 1942 and are believed to be unbroken. Ralph Erskine has presented the intercepts in a letter to the journal Cryptologia. The signals were presumably enciphered with the four rotor Enigma M4 - hence the name of the project. This project has officially started as of January 9th, 2006. You can help out by donating idle time of your computer to the project. If you want to participate, then visit the projects website at http://www.bytereef.org/index.html The first message was broken on January 20th, and as a consequence has generated rather a lot of media interest - the latest being today on the BBC website. I've created this poll purely out of interest to find out how people found out about the project, and on how many machines they intend on "donating" runtime to the project.