December 17, 1998, Nancy (France) Dear all, no special news this month, apart from new champions as usual, whence next newsletters will only appear for particular events (new version, or new records), unless you ask me to continue the monthly rate, of course. New champions. Since last newsletter from November 23, five new champions were found by gmp-ecm (we were not as lucky as last month): 1653107399970694443954636520243006311041 divides (5^17-1)^16+1 Lygeros/Mizony 20370340598250849033999239392855575179873 divides (21^13-1)^12+1 Lygeros/Mizony 20771846461366882183948933135674093754141 divides (69^11-1)^10+1 Lygeros/Mizony 186349342348708255036243298292547441588891 divides (2^24-1)^23+1 Lygeros/Mizony 4113692566646269086681360438319957036345801 divides 11^265+1 Zimmermann There is a slightly faster (about 7%) faster Linux binary available in the Ecmnet ftp directory (ecm3b.intelp6-pc-linux), a new binary for Sparc v8 (ecm3b.sparcv8-sun-solaris2.5.1) which is two times faster than the previous binary (ecm3a.sun4c) that ran on these machines. Torbjorn Granlund contributed several new binaries, and helped me to better name the binaries. Finally, following a suggestion of Richard Brent, I started to write in a paper the few tricks that are used in gmp-ecm. The paper is far from finished, but I thought some of you may still be interested, whence I've put a first draft in http://www.loria.fr/~zimmerma/records/all.ps.gz Of course, every comment is welcome! Merry Christmas and happy new year to all of you, and your families, Paul