And if you haven't been following, the contest is here:

http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/programming-contest-win-...

and an interesting thread on using NVidia's CUDA to crunch on it (with code) is here: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=102349

Why did they release the phrase and not just the SHA1?

ETA: I'm using 1249c4b7f578204f10798c0269f8488280fb9981

ETA2: Ok, I guess I need to be more clear - by releasing the phrase they remove the possibility (as remote as it is) of someone finding an exact match.

I would have preferred they released both, just so people could be sure nothing got lost in translation (e.g. they added a null accidentally or something).

they released an example in the original problem statement. calibrate with that.

just to be sure i'm measureing from the correct thing, did everone else get:

0001001001001001110001001011011111110101011110000010000001001111000100000111100110001100000000100110100111111000010010001000001010000000111110111001100110000001

Yes, that's what I got too for the binary equivalent of the sha1'd challenge phrase.

They host the document on AWS.

yup we host lots of stuff on aws, why is that an issue?

I think he was pointing out the cool factor of it

I think he was pointing out it's humorous that a cloud hosting company is using another cloud hosting company to host their materials.

except that amazon has invested in engine yard and we have a cloud service that runs on top of AWS(http://www.engineyard.com/cloud-services) so it's not so humorous.

I didn't make the joke, just pointed out what it was.