An effort in which thousands of people donate their computers' unused processing power uncovers the largest prime number so far known. Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote ...

Peer-to-peer or grid computing has been around for quite a few years now. Corporate enterprises have shown little interest, but the scientific community has embraced it as a means to enable its ...

A new network paradigm can generate meaningfully random numbers—and fast. In network encryption, randomness has huge value because it’s not “solvable” by hackers. Classical computers can’t be ...