May 2019:
A 20-year-old cryptographic puzzle was solved by a self-taught programmer from Belgium, 15 years earlier than MIT scientists expected. Bernard Fabrot spent the last three and a half years computing the solution to a puzzle first announced by MIT researchers in 1999. Separately, another team led by tech executive Simon Peffers is nearing completion of computing a solution. The puzzle involved roughly 80 trillion successive squarings of a starting number, and was specifically designed to foil anyone trying to solve it more quickly by using parallel computing.

Prof. Ron Rivest, who released the original crypto time-lock, has issued a new puzzle for the CSAIL Time Capsule, which is expected to take (at least) 15 years to solve. This would be 2034, the original target date for the solution of the LCS35 puzzle. The year 2034 will also be the 70th anniversary of Project MAC (which was founded in 1963).