Following on from the end of Grid.org I now read that the RSA Labs challenges are ending too. This was what kicked off the whole distributed processing movement, outside universities and industry. For the latest project it was looking like taking a few thousand years to test all possible keys, so it had at least proved how hard some codes are to break. It seems a lot of people were just in it for the statistics. distributed.net will still have an active project called OGR, which aims to find some potentially useful mathematical structures, but they are polling uses as to whether to continue with the RSA project. I think they should give it us and do some more useful stuff. I think they have already lost most of their contributors to things like Folding@home. I will probably switch my home PC back to that once I get it upgraded.