Posted by
emmett
on from the et-phone-home-two-point-oh dept.
Rafael writes "The SETI@home project, aimed at using a computer screensaver to search for alien signals, seemed almost as crazy as searching at all. However, it became a phenomenon and an ever-increasing Internet addiction. Now SETI@home is being improved. Check the history at the BBC's Web page."
They talk about adding new code to look for pulsating signals, this is a very interesting idea, but unfortunately I am afraid that a lot of people will not switch from v1.6 to v2.0, due to the fact that this additional check will increase the amount of time that it takes to process a block. A lot of the people I know here at Cornell are doing this as much for the recognition of processing X number of blocks a day, as they are for the actual science of the project.
Nearly every person that I know ran the SETI client alot when it first came out. It was fun competition to see who could spread their user to the most machines, change other people's userid's remotely, or just a trophy of computing muscle. It didn't take too long before people started trying to crack it.
It was pretty fun during the attempt, but when it succeded, the whole thing became pretty meaningless. The user Ragnar - who I happen to know personally - is a prime example (likely the best). If you check his stats, he should be in #10th place, or maybe even higher. I havn't checked in a while. The method that he uses is quite ingenious, yet still horribly unbalances the whole thing. (I've abandoned my saintalex user, who ended up getting picked up by ragnar, so I'm not being a hypocrite here:)
Guess it's back to RC5.
SaintAlex
Observe, reason, and experiment.
--
Observe, reason, and experiment.
(if you're too dumb, just pray)
yep... once again the seti project misses the target. am i the only one who sees the problem here, my brothers? can this project ever "succeed" being run by people this clueless?
let's say you lived out in the woods in the deep south. you wake up one morning, nice and toasty warm in your red long-underwear. you decide you'd better go hunting today, if you're going to have dinner tonight. hmmmmm. rabbit sounds dang good!
what do you do? go grab your rifle and just tromple through the woods hoping to scare up some scraggly rabbit? of course not... you grab your rifle and your bloodhound and go tromple through the woods knowing your bloodhound will sniff out a nice fat meal!
"good god, open source man has finally lost his mind!" i can hear you gasp. well, when have i ever let you down?!
what the seti project needs is a bloodhound. it's ludicrous to just shove a bunch of software on some brain-dead intel driven computer and expect to sort out any kind of an intelligent signal. the seti project is trompling through the woods, without a keen nose to sniff out those crispy alien critters!
this is why i recommend that the seti project release a version of seti at home that runs on... get this... the aibo! yes, my brothers, our whacky friend, the aibo has come of age and is ready to mature into the sophisticated extraterrestial tracking device it has always been destined to become.
the aibo - he's not just for petrification any more!
thank you.
The idea behind seti is great.
by
zerocool^
·
· Score: 3
The Idea of Seti@ is great. I think its great.
However... The other day, i was in a computer lab at the college where i attend, and in the (ctl-alt-del) task manager in NT, i noticed one of the process was RC-5 and another was seti@home. I can't kill the process, not in five minutes anyway, without admin access and on a guest account... meaning someone with admin access put it on, its using 90% of my processor cycles, and i don't want it on my computer lab station. I move to a different station. Its there too. Well. This is sure legal. Some bright kid with SysAdmin access put the programs on there. There are like 400 Computers in this room.
Seti is a great Idea. unfortunately, things like it and RC-5 always make a following that they don't need and that no one wants. If you want to make your processor run hot, go ahead. Don't put it near me.
What do you mean, I can't initialize things in an assert?" ~zero
-- sig?
Linux and Slashdot on Seti@Home
by
retep
·
· Score: 4
There is both a Linux and Slashdot group on Seti@Home. If you want to help out just go to the Seti@Home website and download the client. After installing the client you can just join the Slashdot or Linux group by going to the groups link on the main page. Search for the group you want. Then just join the group.
The Slashdot group currently has 424 members and has computed 47953 packets.
The Linux group currently has 344 members and has computed 146283 packets. (there are a few *really* good systems in the Linux group that process the bulk of those packets)
An intelligent signal was detected by a Windows user in Memphis last month but was kept quiet by SETI. They knew it was a message from an alien race but they could not decode what it meant. An encryption specialist who knew someone at distributed.net handed the message over to them and unbeknownst to users, the message was inserted into the key-cracking server. Early this morning the message was cracked and experts were amazed at the significance and wisdom the contacting race had bestowed upon us. The NWO wanted to keep this to themselves and control the rest of the world however with the release of Kevin Mitnick this morning this was impossible. Kevin broke into Top Security systems at NASA and stole this incredible piece of knowledge and has now given it to the world. Without further hesitation, the message:
This is not a trivial question. Firstly, SETI@Home uses the Aricebo Radio Telescope. This is a very nice dish for radio astronomy, but useless for SETI work. It's far too small. The smallest useful dish or array will be the hectare array, being built by the SETI Institute. Aricebo will only be able to detect signals from nearby stars that are: (a) at LEAST as strong as our most powerful RADAR, (b) SUSATAINED for a substantial period of time, (c) containing information on a carrier wave, (d) orbiting a planet or star, with no compensation for motion
In short, leakage (the most likely sort of signal to be found) will be invisible, actual RADAR type devices will be screened out (too short a duration and no information content), and any civilisation advanced enough to WANT to locate other civilisations by sending deliberate signals are likely to be filtered, by being screened out as local interference through a lack of doplar shift.
Methinks that SETI@Home is ingenious, but is using the wrong telescope. And it'll be finished before the RIGHT telescope has been built & put on-line.
As for "Open Sourcing" SETI@Home, it was, to start off with. The original UNIX client was GPLed. Hardly anyone bothered to do anything with it, and so they closed the source & shoved it over to a commercial house. Don't blame them - look to yourself first.
Having said that, SETI@Home's attitude has been somewhat attrocious. They've been going on about security, when that was never the cause of them going non-Open Source. Progress was. And part of that is their fault. They refused to set up a CVS repository, did VERY slow (and low-quality) releases, and basically impeded themselves at every turn. They should have done a damn sight better than that. Yes, there were only a few people there, which is EXACTLY WHY they needed to use CVS, rather than relying on manually testing every e-mailed patch, and rolling a fresh tarball by hand every few weeks or months.
Honestly, if SETI@Home has shown anything, it's shown that we should be less worried about intelligence "out there" and rather more worried by the lack of it down here.
-- It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There's a much stronger feeling of a "team effort" with distributed.net, and how can you help loving those cool little cow icons?
Seriously, two weeks ago I reinstalled the NT command line version of Seti (an ANCIENT client, but there hasn't been an update) on one of my machines and let it run all night...wouldn't you know it, it hung on sending and receivingg the data, and the stats I had (I identified myself with the same Email address I had previously used) never showed up. So I deleted it and went back to CSC.
Let's keep cracking on RC5! I can't wait for the OGR contest to start.
When I first heard about SETI@Home last summer I was thrilled; ever since I was a child I had been fascinated by outer space and the possibilities of life beyond our planet. I installed the software and even watched it process as I was going to sleep at night. I kept diligent records of my own peaks and high Gaussians and even had a map where I pinpointed where in the sky my data had come from. (And of course I studied the stats on the SETI homepage trying desperately to surpass everyone else on my domain in units completed. I don't have a fast processor; I never did.)
Well, I don't do that anymore. I took it off my screensaver after a while and then when I went to DSL and had it automatically connect, most of the time I forgot it was there. But still, I'm glad to have it and glad to have the opportunity to participate; in a small way it's like fulfilling a dream from my childhood. I thank all those involved for that.
As for the new version coming out, I'm crossing my fingers that it'll fix the connection problems I've been experiencing ever since we networked our computers and I no longer have a direct connection to the Internet. Even though I don't look at it much anymore, I think it's a worthwhile project--both for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and for distibuted computing.
Well I'm seeing a lot of "what happens when they run out of data" posts deep down, so let me contribute my $0.02 worth of radio astronomy:
Much of the current data was picked up during the Arecibo upgrade, where the telescope was essentially out of commission and staring up at the sky.Since the earth rotates, the sky over the telescope changes, so just grabbing all the signal ("drift scans") still provided useful data.
Arecibo is huge - 305m in diameter, almost exactly a kilometer around (makes a good jogging track!): that's too large to steer. So it was designed as a spherical dish section, not parabolic like a sattelite dish: a parabola sees perfectly in one pointing direction, but a spherical dish can see fuzzily in any direction.
During the upgrade, the old line feed has been augmented by a Gregorian reflector, which allows perfect focus from a spherical dish. But the line feed still exists, as you can see from the pictures. So now, while the Gregorian takes astronomy data, the old line feed can continue looking off in some other (random) part of the sky, and take useful search data! And if the piggyback project is still running, the SETI people also get first dibs on all our data to search for their signals.
With additional tests for pulsations, one wonders how many of our pulsars the SETI people will rediscover. Useful check on their processing quality, I'm sure...
Arecibo's neat - consider visiting if you ever get a chance. Takes your breath away to realize the size of it all!
-- "I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Re:OPEN SOURCE[ing] SETI (is a very, very, bad ide
by
ethereal
·
· Score: 4
I've disagreed with this before, so here goes:
With hundreds of variations of the client floating around, it's more than likely that many would be incompatible with the SETI servers.
So the SETI servers don't send them blocks, process their blocks, or record their stats. Problem solved - if you want to be a part of the project, you have to use a compatible client.
Secondly, cheating (getting counted for undeserved blocks) would expierence a boon.
There are two ways that people could cheat: returning false negative results without actually checking the results, and returning false positive results when there really isn't a positive.
False negatives can be easily caught by issuing the same blocks to other clients. Compare the results, and if they disagree run them again at SETI HQ, and ban the cheating clients from participating. The article already discusses how they are sending the same blocks to two clients at once, they just need to up that level of redundancy a little bit to solve this problem. You couldn't normally trust even a non-hacked client to provide the correct results 100% of the time anyway, because that machine might have bad RAM, an overclocked processor, no cooling, the case off, and a RF transmitter in the next room. Some level of redundancy will always be necessary for this sort of project, and can also be used to catch cheaters.
False positive results are even easier to catch. Don't you think that SETI HQ will check any positive results themselves before going public? They aren't going to call the NY Times on the strength of hacked.linux.box returning a positive on it's first data block, let me tell you. Just ban clients that return false positives, and get on with the thing.
When discussing open-sourcing distributed.net's key cracking, where there's a prize attached, it has been pointed out that a hacked client could be used to return a false negative but inform the user so that they can claim the prize before d.net can. But for SETI@Home, there isn't any danger of that. Who is going to believe J. Random Hacker's claims of detecting SETI on his bedroom PC? Even if someone did this, there's only one place that the raw data could have been coming from, because J. Random Hacker certainly doesn't have a high-powered radio telescope in the back yard generating all that data.
In short, I have yet to hear a good explanation of why the benefits of open-sourcing the client wouldn't exceed the problems (minimal, see above) of doing so.
Of course, no discussion of SETI@Home is complete without mentioning: "WHY WON"T THEY OPEN SOURCE IT?!?"
This may have been discussed previously, but I'll bite anyway. The problem with open-sourcing the SETI signal-processing code is the fact that this is a running experiment. With open-source operating systems, web-hosts, games, etc, you will be running these on your own computers and/or on your own networks. The SETI example is completely different. With SETI, you are contributing to their scientific experiment. Therefore, they want to know precisely how every resulting piece of data was processed. I cannot stress that enough. As a scientist, I can assure you that if you cannot verify the integrity of certain data, then you may as well throw that data out (or re-run the experiment at the least. As learned with the cold fusion people, DON'T PUBLISH if you're not certain of the validity of the data).
The problem with open-sourcing the code is that somebody on the client side could very well have changed the processing code, and introduced any number of possible errors. It could be something seemingly harmless, like using single-precision floats or linear interpolation, in some places instead of whatever methods were originally employed there, for a processing-speed gain. However, there is no way that the SETI folks can tell if the data they are receiving has been processed correctly or not. And one thing SETI cannot do is accept compromised data.
I do believe it is in the public interest to let others know the code processing and evaluating techniques, though. What could be done is run an open-source type development of a separate client system, and then release some sort of binary-only module for the actual runtime client (perhaps they'll not reveal the data-authentication routines, for instance). You may disagree completely with this, but please understand that from the point of view of a science experiment, they MUST in no way whatsoever receive data processed in a different method than they originally intended .
--
make world, not war
You may find this interesting
by
BrianH
·
· Score: 3
I know I'm posting this fairly late in the thread life, but I REALLY hope some of you will find this interesting.
Last night I attended a lecture/discussion by Dr. Kent Cullers, the Signal Detection Group Leader, one of the project managers in the SETI Phoenix Project, and one of the board members of the SETI@Home program (ever see Contact? The blind radio astronomer was modeled after him). After the lecture, I asked Dr. Cullers about this very topic. I told him flat out that I could not understand why a project with as lofty goals as SETI would willingly give a cold shoulder to thousands of potential programmers willing to donate their time towards developing more efficient clients and (potentially) search algorithms. I also told him flat out (in front of 100+ people) that while I've always supported the goals of SETI, their cold shoulder to the OSS community made no sense when you consider their claims of supporting scientific cooperation. His reply was refreshing, honest, and to the point.
The first thing he told me was that, despite public claims to the contrary, security is not SETI@Home's biggest concern. The REAL problem right now is that there is apparently no efficient system in place for transporting large blocks of information from the receiver setup to the SETI@Home hub at Berkeley. I'm not sure how many of you realize this, but SETI@Home is an affiliate of SETI, not a directly controlled part of the organization. He told us that SETI itself has a very large quantity of unprocessed data to sort through, but without the proper infrastructure to get it to the S@H users, there's no easy way to handle them. This IS being worked on though, so don't lose faith yet.
The second thing that he pointed out was that there are people inside of SETI, including HIM (remember, he's on the SETI@Home board), that want to see the client opened up. In fact, he pointed out that this very topic is already on his agenda to be brought up at the next board meeting. You know why he's on our side? Because, in addition to his many other amazing talents, he's a programmer! (yeah, a blind computer programmer...this man has just earned my respect for life). He described the hoops HE has to jump through to get access to the code, and he's a friggin board member! While he couldn't give me any promises, he was MUCH more receptive to the idea than any of the other SETI guys I've seen quoted on Slashdot.
In the meantime, he gave me this suggestion: Apparently a small part of the problem is that Dr. David Anderson, the head of the SETI@Home project, isn't entirely convinced that OSS developers could really bring about any significant improvements. Dr. Cullers stated that the best way he could think of to change Dr. Andersons mind would be to email him suggestions as to possible ways to improve the performance and reliability of the client. According to Dr. Cullers, getting him to open it is simply a matter of impressing on him the fact that we can help, and that we wont just be getting in the way. I realize that some people may have a problem sending coding suggestions to a closed-source project, but according to Dr. Cullers it would definitely help further the cause.
And on one final note, I'd like to tell you all something. I walked away from that lecture with an entirely different take on SETI. They're not a tired old organization desperate for government funding anymore, they've got some cool new projects already underway and in the works for the near future (SETI Optical, new arrays for Phoenix, etc.) Dr. Cullers made a very realistic projection (explaining the math and technology) that Phoenix will have out entire galaxy scanned in less than 50 years (they haven't even really touched it yet). Please remember, SETI has little direct control over SETI@Home, so don't let your poor opinions of the S@H project ruin your views of the entire program. SETI is worthy of our support.
--
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Slashdot Mirror
It is open source, GPL, and for Linux
They talk about adding new code to look for pulsating signals, this is a very interesting idea, but unfortunately I am afraid that a lot of people will not switch from v1.6 to v2.0, due to the fact that this additional check will increase the amount of time that it takes to process a block. A lot of the people I know here at Cornell are doing this as much for the recognition of processing X number of blocks a day, as they are for the actual science of the project.
Nearly every person that I know ran the SETI client alot when it first came out. It was fun competition to see who could spread their user to the most machines, change other people's userid's remotely, or just a trophy of computing muscle. It didn't take too long before people started trying to crack it.
:)
It was pretty fun during the attempt, but when it succeded, the whole thing became pretty meaningless. The user Ragnar - who I happen to know personally - is a prime example (likely the best). If you check his stats, he should be in #10th place, or maybe even higher. I havn't checked in a while. The method that he uses is quite ingenious, yet still horribly unbalances the whole thing. (I've abandoned my saintalex user, who ended up getting picked up by ragnar, so I'm not being a hypocrite here
Guess it's back to RC5.
SaintAlex
Observe, reason, and experiment.
Observe, reason, and experiment.
(if you're too dumb, just pray)
yep... once again the seti project misses the target. am i the only one who sees the problem here, my brothers? can this project ever "succeed" being run by people this clueless?
let's say you lived out in the woods in the deep south. you wake up one morning, nice and toasty warm in your red long-underwear. you decide you'd better go hunting today, if you're going to have dinner tonight. hmmmmm. rabbit sounds dang good!
what do you do? go grab your rifle and just tromple through the woods hoping to scare up some scraggly rabbit? of course not... you grab your rifle and your bloodhound and go tromple through the woods knowing your bloodhound will sniff out a nice fat meal!
"good god, open source man has finally lost his mind!" i can hear you gasp. well, when have i ever let you down?!
what the seti project needs is a bloodhound. it's ludicrous to just shove a bunch of software on some brain-dead intel driven computer and expect to sort out any kind of an intelligent signal. the seti project is trompling through the woods, without a keen nose to sniff out those crispy alien critters!
this is why i recommend that the seti project release a version of seti at home that runs on... get this... the aibo! yes, my brothers, our whacky friend, the aibo has come of age and is ready to mature into the sophisticated extraterrestial tracking device it has always been destined to become.
the aibo - he's not just for petrification any more!
thank you.
However... The other day, i was in a computer lab at the college where i attend, and in the (ctl-alt-del) task manager in NT, i noticed one of the process was RC-5 and another was seti@home. I can't kill the process, not in five minutes anyway, without admin access and on a guest account... meaning someone with admin access put it on, its using 90% of my processor cycles, and i don't want it on my computer lab station.
I move to a different station.
Its there too. Well. This is sure legal.
Some bright kid with SysAdmin access put the programs on there. There are like 400 Computers in this room.
What do you mean, I can't initialize things in an assert?"
~zero
sig?
There is both a Linux and Slashdot group on Seti@Home. If you want to help out just go to the Seti@Home website and download the client. After installing the client you can just join the Slashdot or Linux group by going to the groups link on the main page. Search for the group you want. Then just join the group.
The Slashdot group currently has 424 members and has computed 47953 packets.
The Linux group currently has 344 members and has computed 146283 packets. (there are a few *really* good systems in the Linux group that process the bulk of those packets)
An intelligent signal was detected by a Windows user in Memphis last month but was kept quiet by SETI. They knew it was a message from an alien race but they could not decode what it meant. An encryption specialist who knew someone at distributed.net handed the message over to them and unbeknownst to users, the message was inserted into the key-cracking server. Early this morning the message was cracked and experts were amazed at the significance and wisdom the contacting race had bestowed upon us. The NWO wanted to keep this to themselves and control the rest of the world however with the release of Kevin Mitnick this morning this was impossible. Kevin broke into Top Security systems at NASA and stole this incredible piece of knowledge and has now given it to the world. Without further hesitation, the message:
FIRST POST!!!!
God Fucking Damnit
In short, leakage (the most likely sort of signal to be found) will be invisible, actual RADAR type devices will be screened out (too short a duration and no information content), and any civilisation advanced enough to WANT to locate other civilisations by sending deliberate signals are likely to be filtered, by being screened out as local interference through a lack of doplar shift.
Methinks that SETI@Home is ingenious, but is using the wrong telescope. And it'll be finished before the RIGHT telescope has been built & put on-line.
As for "Open Sourcing" SETI@Home, it was, to start off with. The original UNIX client was GPLed. Hardly anyone bothered to do anything with it, and so they closed the source & shoved it over to a commercial house. Don't blame them - look to yourself first.
Having said that, SETI@Home's attitude has been somewhat attrocious. They've been going on about security, when that was never the cause of them going non-Open Source. Progress was. And part of that is their fault. They refused to set up a CVS repository, did VERY slow (and low-quality) releases, and basically impeded themselves at every turn. They should have done a damn sight better than that. Yes, there were only a few people there, which is EXACTLY WHY they needed to use CVS, rather than relying on manually testing every e-mailed patch, and rolling a fresh tarball by hand every few weeks or months.
Honestly, if SETI@Home has shown anything, it's shown that we should be less worried about intelligence "out there" and rather more worried by the lack of it down here.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The lack of timely upgrades for the client a la distributed.net
The lack of updates of fresh content on the website a la distributed.net
Network outages
"Recycling" of data - just a horrible waste of time
I'm happy to say I was with CSC since day one and I'm still happily cracking away on RC5.
There's a much stronger feeling of a "team effort" with distributed.net, and how can you help loving those cool little cow icons?
Seriously, two weeks ago I reinstalled the NT command line version of Seti (an ANCIENT client, but there hasn't been an update) on one of my machines and let it run all night...wouldn't you know it, it hung on sending and receivingg the data, and the stats I had (I identified myself with the same Email address I had previously used) never showed up. So I deleted it and went back to CSC.
Let's keep cracking on RC5! I can't wait for the OGR contest to start.
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
When I first heard about SETI@Home last summer I was thrilled; ever since I was a child I had been fascinated by outer space and the possibilities of life beyond our planet. I installed the software and even watched it process as I was going to sleep at night. I kept diligent records of my own peaks and high Gaussians and even had a map where I pinpointed where in the sky my data had come from. (And of course I studied the stats on the SETI homepage trying desperately to surpass everyone else on my domain in units completed. I don't have a fast processor; I never did.)
Well, I don't do that anymore. I took it off my screensaver after a while and then when I went to DSL and had it automatically connect, most of the time I forgot it was there. But still, I'm glad to have it and glad to have the opportunity to participate; in a small way it's like fulfilling a dream from my childhood. I thank all those involved for that.
As for the new version coming out, I'm crossing my fingers that it'll fix the connection problems I've been experiencing ever since we networked our computers and I no longer have a direct connection to the Internet. Even though I don't look at it much anymore, I think it's a worthwhile project--both for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and for distibuted computing.
Gothea
Much of the current data was picked up during the Arecibo upgrade, where the telescope was essentially out of commission and staring up at the sky.Since the earth rotates, the sky over the telescope changes, so just grabbing all the signal ("drift scans") still provided useful data.
Arecibo is huge - 305m in diameter, almost exactly a kilometer around (makes a good jogging track!): that's too large to steer. So it was designed as a spherical dish section, not parabolic like a sattelite dish: a parabola sees perfectly in one pointing direction, but a spherical dish can see fuzzily in any direction.
During the upgrade, the old line feed has been augmented by a Gregorian reflector, which allows perfect focus from a spherical dish. But the line feed still exists, as you can see from the pictures. So now, while the Gregorian takes astronomy data, the old line feed can continue looking off in some other (random) part of the sky, and take useful search data! And if the piggyback project is still running, the SETI people also get first dibs on all our data to search for their signals.
With additional tests for pulsations, one wonders how many of our pulsars the SETI people will rediscover. Useful check on their processing quality, I'm sure...
Arecibo's neat - consider visiting if you ever get a chance. Takes your breath away to realize the size of it all!
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
I've disagreed with this before, so here goes:
So the SETI servers don't send them blocks, process their blocks, or record their stats. Problem solved - if you want to be a part of the project, you have to use a compatible client.
There are two ways that people could cheat: returning false negative results without actually checking the results, and returning false positive results when there really isn't a positive.
When discussing open-sourcing distributed.net's key cracking, where there's a prize attached, it has been pointed out that a hacked client could be used to return a false negative but inform the user so that they can claim the prize before d.net can. But for SETI@Home, there isn't any danger of that. Who is going to believe J. Random Hacker's claims of detecting SETI on his bedroom PC? Even if someone did this, there's only one place that the raw data could have been coming from, because J. Random Hacker certainly doesn't have a high-powered radio telescope in the back yard generating all that data.
In short, I have yet to hear a good explanation of why the benefits of open-sourcing the client wouldn't exceed the problems (minimal, see above) of doing so.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
This may have been discussed previously, but I'll bite anyway. The problem with open-sourcing the SETI signal-processing code is the fact that this is a running experiment. With open-source operating systems, web-hosts, games, etc, you will be running these on your own computers and/or on your own networks. The SETI example is completely different. With SETI, you are contributing to their scientific experiment. Therefore, they want to know precisely how every resulting piece of data was processed. I cannot stress that enough. As a scientist, I can assure you that if you cannot verify the integrity of certain data, then you may as well throw that data out (or re-run the experiment at the least. As learned with the cold fusion people, DON'T PUBLISH if you're not certain of the validity of the data).
The problem with open-sourcing the code is that somebody on the client side could very well have changed the processing code, and introduced any number of possible errors. It could be something seemingly harmless, like using single-precision floats or linear interpolation, in some places instead of whatever methods were originally employed there, for a processing-speed gain. However, there is no way that the SETI folks can tell if the data they are receiving has been processed correctly or not. And one thing SETI cannot do is accept compromised data.
I do believe it is in the public interest to let others know the code processing and evaluating techniques, though. What could be done is run an open-source type development of a separate client system, and then release some sort of binary-only module for the actual runtime client (perhaps they'll not reveal the data-authentication routines, for instance). You may disagree completely with this, but please understand that from the point of view of a science experiment, they MUST in no way whatsoever receive data processed in a different method than they originally intended .
make world, not war
I know I'm posting this fairly late in the thread life, but I REALLY hope some of you will find this interesting.
Last night I attended a lecture/discussion by Dr. Kent Cullers, the Signal Detection Group Leader, one of the project managers in the SETI Phoenix Project, and one of the board members of the SETI@Home program (ever see Contact? The blind radio astronomer was modeled after him). After the lecture, I asked Dr. Cullers about this very topic. I told him flat out that I could not understand why a project with as lofty goals as SETI would willingly give a cold shoulder to thousands of potential programmers willing to donate their time towards developing more efficient clients and (potentially) search algorithms. I also told him flat out (in front of 100+ people) that while I've always supported the goals of SETI, their cold shoulder to the OSS community made no sense when you consider their claims of supporting scientific cooperation. His reply was refreshing, honest, and to the point.
The first thing he told me was that, despite public claims to the contrary, security is not SETI@Home's biggest concern. The REAL problem right now is that there is apparently no efficient system in place for transporting large blocks of information from the receiver setup to the SETI@Home hub at Berkeley. I'm not sure how many of you realize this, but SETI@Home is an affiliate of SETI, not a directly controlled part of the organization. He told us that SETI itself has a very large quantity of unprocessed data to sort through, but without the proper infrastructure to get it to the S@H users, there's no easy way to handle them. This IS being worked on though, so don't lose faith yet.
The second thing that he pointed out was that there are people inside of SETI, including HIM (remember, he's on the SETI@Home board), that want to see the client opened up. In fact, he pointed out that this very topic is already on his agenda to be brought up at the next board meeting. You know why he's on our side? Because, in addition to his many other amazing talents, he's a programmer! (yeah, a blind computer programmer...this man has just earned my respect for life). He described the hoops HE has to jump through to get access to the code, and he's a friggin board member! While he couldn't give me any promises, he was MUCH more receptive to the idea than any of the other SETI guys I've seen quoted on Slashdot.
In the meantime, he gave me this suggestion: Apparently a small part of the problem is that Dr. David Anderson, the head of the SETI@Home project, isn't entirely convinced that OSS developers could really bring about any significant improvements. Dr. Cullers stated that the best way he could think of to change Dr. Andersons mind would be to email him suggestions as to possible ways to improve the performance and reliability of the client. According to Dr. Cullers, getting him to open it is simply a matter of impressing on him the fact that we can help, and that we wont just be getting in the way. I realize that some people may have a problem sending coding suggestions to a closed-source project, but according to Dr. Cullers it would definitely help further the cause.
And on one final note, I'd like to tell you all something. I walked away from that lecture with an entirely different take on SETI. They're not a tired old organization desperate for government funding anymore, they've got some cool new projects already underway and in the works for the near future (SETI Optical, new arrays for Phoenix, etc.) Dr. Cullers made a very realistic projection (explaining the math and technology) that Phoenix will have out entire galaxy scanned in less than 50 years (they haven't even really touched it yet). Please remember, SETI has little direct control over SETI@Home, so don't let your poor opinions of the S@H project ruin your views of the entire program. SETI is worthy of our support.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.