This was repeated a couple of times later, and it appears to have been poor wording in the NT client such that some people thought that they were requesting a number of keys rather than a number of 24 bit segments .
Circumstances lead to the three being merged.
The fact that Hal's first challenge had already been cracked meant that the third objective was changed to be in the shortest real time . During the design phase we discussed checking the number of returned segments and it was decided not to bother. I did it this way round as loosing an ACK is more serious than timing out a request for more segments. Due to the congestion of the SKSP server, the WWW interface was tweaked to try harder to get through without loss of data. This was fixed by having a separate ACK server and changing the allocate client to not try so hard.