Cheating at Seti@home

Interesting paper on this subject by taviso · 2002-10-30 23:57 · Score: 5, Informative

Theres an interesting paper on this subject available here. well worth a read.

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ex$$

Re:Interesting paper on this subject by NearlyHeadless · 2002-10-31 04:10 · Score: 1, Troll

Theres an interesting paper on this subject available here. well worth a read.
It's also worth noting that the Trusted Computing Platform (TCPA) and/or Palladium could be used to solve a problem like this.

Motivation? by Enocasiones · 2002-10-31 00:02 · Score: 5, Insightful

What drives people to do this? You may brag about being first, but still, you'll be first together with all your teammates. Lots of people to share the credit, not much left for an individual. And the fact that the cheating could corrupt the results just makes matters worse.

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Enoc

Re:Motivation? by giminy · 2002-10-31 00:23 · Score: 1, Flamebait

And the fact that the cheating could corrupt the results

Read the article. The cheating doesn't corrupt the results of the effort...this isn't like the distributed.net challenge problem where people could say they checked a portion of the keyspace when in fact they hadn't. If someone's transmitting stuff out there, it won't be overlooked because of the cheaters.

--
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Re:Motivation? by Enocasiones · 2002-10-31 00:26 · Score: 3, Informative

YOU should read the article:
Nealon has also identified ways in which the cheating could pervert the accuracy of data received by the project.
"Pervert the accuracy" means "corrupt" in my dictionary.

--
Enoc
Re:Motivation? by simong_oz · 2002-10-31 00:36 · Score: 2, Informative

My guess would be that it's the same sort of motivation that drives f@%$wits to beat up a pensioner for the $1.50 they might find.

OK, it's a dodgy analogy, but I'm just saying that I'm not sure it's possible to understand the motivation without having it yourself. To you and I (and many others), corrupting the results of the research is a terrible thing, but these arseholes just don't give a shit.

--
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
Re:Motivation? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 01:05 · Score: 5, Informative

I'm not an anonymous coward. My handle in seti is EG, I crunch for EXDC and am a member of ARS technica.

One of the cheats actually indexes the name of the wu. the name of the wu contains data that locates the data to a chunk of the data tape.

by indexing the same file name over and over to bypass the duplicate checking routines, you are introducing wu's that do not correlate to their proper location in space. Resubmit such a wu thousands of times with the name indexed each time it's sent destroys the baseline of the science database. Copy the same wu to 1,000 other people for submission multiplies the error a million fold. it is very conceivable that there might be whole chunks of wu's results that cannot be scientifically normed to ANY location on the starmap! It does effect the science data.
Re:Motivation? by Dexter's+Laboratory · 2002-10-31 02:25 · Score: 1

Since when do you HAVE to be in a team?
Re:Motivation? by mosch · 2002-10-31 08:44 · Score: 4, Funny

A lot of people are assuming that these people cheated in order to up their stats (because seti stats get ya mad bitches!). I don't buy this for a second.
I believe that these "cheaters" are in fact alien lifeforms, who are covertly working to sabotage the fine research being done by the seti@home project. The project was coming close to discovering the location of their invasion force, so a crack team was sent to earth to disable the earth information gathering project, and to lay the blame squarely at the feet of other earthlings.
those aliens weren't quite clever enough though, were they...
Re:Motivation? by Enocasiones · 2002-10-31 18:00 · Score: 1

Did you read the article? Or the Slashdot excerpt. for what it matters. It all hangs around the NE team...

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Enoc

Holey Moley! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 00:03 · Score: 4, Funny

A first post which is

1. on-topic
2. gets modded up

What's this world coming to?

Re:Holey Moley! by phunhippy · 2002-10-31 00:31 · Score: 0, Troll

A first post which is

1. on-topic
2. gets modded up

What's this world coming to?

2nd posts that are surprised at a first post that is relevant and a shameless FUNNY karma whoreing grab...
Re:Holey Moley! by isorox · 2002-10-31 00:56 · Score: 2

What's this world coming to?

I blame the new server - its all different and backwards on that side of the country. They drive on the wrong side of the road too dont they?
Re:Holey Moley! by xanadu-xtroot.com · 2002-10-31 03:20 · Score: 0, Offtopic

2nd posts that are surprised at a first post that is relevant and a shameless FUNNY karma whoreing grab...

Well, it is Halloween...
It may not be April 1st, but close enough, it seems...

:-)

--
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Re:Holey Moley! by JabberWokky · 2002-10-31 03:27 · Score: 1, Offtopic

No, but they have those funky half-sized parking stops that don't exist anywhere on the east coast. Having recently moved to the west coast, I think that's the primary difference.
--
Evan "Oh, and CA has crappy traffic signals and signs"

--
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Re:Holey Moley! by isorox · 2002-10-31 09:17 · Score: 1

Yup, sadly it doesnt exist any more - it was on the load tester (brak).

But thats nothing compared with the troll-report post

Re:whyd they by murat · 2002-10-31 00:03 · Score: 2, Funny

why were they cheating seti, a not for profit orginization, when they could be doing actual work

For positive KARMA!

Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by holle2 · 2002-10-31 00:03 · Score: 5, Interesting

I thought the move to close the source of SETI@home back in the old days was meant to stop the cheating ?
Could it be that the protocol should be redesigned to contain, say digital signaures embedded into the binary (well not really a save place for that anyway ..)

Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by Enocasiones · 2002-10-31 00:33 · Score: 3, Interesting

M$ products & others' are closed and look at all the "cheats" (exploits) you can use on them. You cant stop the cheating through obscurity, as the linked page in the First Post states.

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Enoc
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by ebbomega · 2002-10-31 00:53 · Score: 4, Interesting

If anything, closing source opens you up to "cheats" because every time that an exploit/cheat comes up, you don't have OpenSource-support to fix it sooner rather than later.

Closing source isn't like sealing a tank. It's more like building a beaver-dam.

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Karma: Non-Heinous
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by anshil · 2002-10-31 01:01 · Score: 5, Interesting

Closing the source does not help a bit. After all you give a binary to your "foe", thats enough. Look in example to Ultima Online, they encrypt the stream already in 10 layers or so, with constant changing keys, algorithmns and so on. But it is still beeing hacked, simple as that, you've a binary of the client, you can view the algorithmn on assembler basis, thats enough "source" code to hack anything assuming enough motivation and time.

Look at all the companies trying to hinder people copying with copy protection CD's, tongels and all that. Does it help? No it's all just a new challange for the hacker folk.

--

--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by keller · 2002-10-31 01:05 · Score: 1

This is not the kind of cheating the closed source was supposed to prevent.
SETI@home doesn't want people to mingle with the results af the analysis and or the packet data, and indicate signs of life when there is none. That kind of cheating would be catastrophic...

--
Enig? Det alt for hot det smor!
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by fitten · 2002-10-31 01:59 · Score: 2, Insightful

In a very ideolistic view, yes. Opening the source also makes it *very* easy for me to take the source, then do whatever I want to the code to produce whatever results I want using as much/little CPU as I want and return whatever results I want. Basically, I can change the program to be like this:

int main()
{
read_data_from_server();
compute_bogus_validator();
send_bogus_results_to_server();
}

and since I have the *source*, it is very easy to read and interpret (don't need to know ASM or anything or deal with decyphering of disassembled code).

Yes, you can fix bugs and submit the changes to fix the source tree but you make it *much* easier for cheaters to cheat if they want (and quite possibly enable more people to cheat).
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by fitten · 2002-10-31 02:04 · Score: 1

er... needed to add more... Open Source as you speak of it assumes that people *want* to have bug-free and usable code that produces correct results. That is why bug fixes are checked back into the tree. *This* type of cheating would love the source so they could modify the source at home even easier with less effort/time (with no intention ever of checking the changes into the source tree) to produce bogus results faster.
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 02:44 · Score: 0

SETI@home doesn't want people to mingle with the results af the analysis and or the packet data, and indicate signs of life when there is none.
the other year my family was making sauerkraut, and my aunt noticed it called for a lot of salt. she thought it would be healthier if she cut the salt down to a tenth. ruined the whole batch and my granma was PISSED (aint nothin like a pissed off 95 year old).
if the recipe had been closed source, maybe just a packet of "stuff" to add instead of the exact ingredients, then my aunt would not have thought she could outsmart the original cooks.
i supposed seti@home w/ their code is the same - some script kiddie would say "ohh, if i change this function here i return results in a tenth of the time", not realizing the underlying math and just been destroyed.
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 04:35 · Score: 0

void main()

damn VB programmer.
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by bogado · 2002-10-31 05:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

In fact this is a hard problem to solve, since you have to trust the computations made on the client side. Every security protocol must not trust the client! The solution in this case would be punishing the guilt.

My opinion is that each login should have a key, this key would sign all the packects received from this particular login. Now for every X packects received from any client, you resend one of them to another user, of there is a mismatch in the packet You then redo the calculation with your trusted code, and checkout witch is cheating and then ban this user.

Since cheating is for achieving higher pontuation, no one would like to be banned, since this would mean that one would have to restart their statisics. Groups could also be punished if one of their members is cheating making them also responsible for their components. This would help to police the network.

The key I proposed is for guaranty that a good user could not be sobotaged by other people sending packets in his name. Also one couls adopt a policy of sending more test packects to user with higher, more suspicious, rates of delivery.

--
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by fitten · 2002-10-31 05:31 · Score: 1

so... I left out

int main(int argc, char *argv[])

I wasn't trying to provide something for you to feed into a compiler.
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by letxa2000 · 2002-10-31 05:59 · Score: 1

Closing source isn't like sealing a tank. It's more like building a beaver-dam.
While I agree that closing the source isn't the solution, your beaver-dam analogy isn't very good. Beaver dams can be VERY strong. When they sufficiently block a small river or stream it often takes dynamite to destroy the dam.
It's ok to criticize closed-source, but not beaver damns. :)
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by ComputerSlicer23 · 2002-10-31 06:00 · Score: 3, Interesting

This system opens up the can of worms for a DOS. Basically, if a given user can overflow the request for a new public key, so no one can request one, because he keeps the machine that is storing them too busy. The other alternative, is "checking bad blocks" is on trusted code doesn't scale with the size of the project. Now cheaters can turn the "checking bad blocks" into a bottleneck by submitting all bad blocks immediatly for you to have to check. Eventually the back log on check the bad blocks will be too difficult.
They also address this in the article if the cheaters can manipulate the system enough to ensure they get the same block twice and send it in twice they win. Plus 99% of all blocks have the same answer: Nope, no interesting data here. That's it. So a cheater just has to send in "Nothing of interest here", for 100K blocks, then request a new public key and do that again. They could wipe out huge chunks of the key space because eventually they will get verified as correct.
When you give source to anyone to run on their machine, you can't ever trust the results.
Kirby
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 06:44 · Score: 0

lol, you really are a VB programmer!!

that has nothing todo with why he said to change it to void, if you declare it as int main() you have to return a value fool!!
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by gengee · 2002-10-31 07:34 · Score: 2

I don't know how SETI@Home currently works - perhaps all it does is send "Interesting" or "Not Interesting" replies. But no matter what it currently does, it certainly doesn't have to be that way.

The client could send a "No interesting date here, becase" message. And the 'because' gets checked by other users periodically. DOS isn't a problem...Just check 1 out of 100 WUs. If that WU is bogus, check another. If that one's bogus, release them all back into the keyspace.

--
- James
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 07:39 · Score: 0

void main is gay
int main() with a proper call to exit is what is needed here.

Stop dicking about and go and LEARN something!
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by fitten · 2002-10-31 07:47 · Score: 1

Well... for SETI, so far 100% of the WU have been "nothing interesting here" I would imagine (I haven't seen anything on CNN about big space ships or little green men). So... how do you know if the WU is "nothing interesting here" because there really is nothing interesting there or because it was faked?

It isn't an easy problem. If you digitally sign each WU, then you can tell if more than one machine is messing with it (by results coming back for the same signature from multiple machines) but this still doesn't protect against a machine simply returning "nothing interesting here" rather than actually computing for a while and determining the same thing. The crux of this problem is "how do you determine that the client really did any work at all, much less the 'right' work on this WU". You can't even count the number of clock cycles spent in computation because that count can be faked (just simply return some reasonable number). You'd have to have some serious smarts in a program to accurately estimate the number of iterations or clock cycles (very bad measure) that will be spent on a WU to make those types of checks.
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by fitten · 2002-10-31 07:57 · Score: 1

And as I said, it wasn't meant to be complete or even compilable... I'm guessing pseudocode is too advanced of a topic /shrug. Make whatever corrections you want and translate it into whatever language you like if that will get the sand out of your clam.
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by ComputerSlicer23 · 2002-10-31 07:58 · Score: 4, Interesting

Okay, your right, I'd just gotten done reading another link from the posts, there is one from distributed.net that discussed all this, and actually was much more interesting then the original link. They talk about using a public key to sign data. Not that differs per individual, but even that is easy to abuse.
It's *MUCH* faster to generate bogus data, then it is to check it. I could generate thousands of work units in an hour. If I was a bad person, I'd sign up for a new name for every single work unit. Or only every 10-20 units. If I can turn them in faster then you can test and reject them, I'm winning. The DOS will actual work. Remember, they can't possibly afford to check 1 out of every million blocks of the data they are sending out, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it as a distributed computing project. I can DOS them if they attempt to run a "trusted" version of the binary locally. I'd whoop them really bad and generating bogus data. The attacker isn't going to play nice and put all their work units in under a single name if they are attempting to subvert the process.
I'm speaking from the perspective of an attacker who want's to subvert the process not rack up a big WU total. If I really wanted to rack up a huge work unit total, I'd take all my units under one name, and then submit them via 10 signed keys when they are done, so they all look like proper work units. Then they never check them locally, because they got verified by 10 different people as the same. How handy... If they have a set of "trusted" users that have to verify all the blocks, then all they should have the trusted people run the binaries, because everybody else will be throttled by the rate of the trusted ones.
In the end, they really can't check anything locally or only by trusted users, because locally and trusted users doesn't scale, that's why it's a distributed process. All the attacker has to do, is overrun the computing resources of the checker, and they win. It's not hard at all to pump to much data at them, because I don't need to do any real work to generate them, they have to do loads of work to check them. (Spoken like a man who use to grade tests.)...
Thanks,
Kirby
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by gengee · 2002-10-31 09:00 · Score: 2

Actually the project has generated many many "Interesting things here" WU's. They didn't translate into green men, but it was interesting enough for people to spend time looking at:)

How do you check that the client really did anything at all? Like I said, I'm not versed on what the client is actually doing - But I'm sure it's doing lots of specific equations.

So you just randomly pick 5 equations that it did, and say "I did these 5 equations on this WU, and here are the results I got". Then another client could get a "cheksum WU" instead of a full fledged WU, do the 5 same equations and say either "Works for me" or "This is bogus".

--
- James
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by gengee · 2002-10-31 09:10 · Score: 2

It's easy enough to stop a person from signing up for multiple accounts, though. Just keep a record of all IP's that signed up for accounts in the past 3 hours. If the IP is on the list, don't let them create an account. Dial-up users get screwed, but they can always come back in 3 hours to sign-up.

Or you could demand an email address, and verify it's authenticity (Send an email, follow a link).

All of this can be subverted, but it'd make it much harder, much slower, and probably not very much fun. It would certainly stop any massive DOS attacks or cheating from taking place.

--
- James
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by machine+of+god · 2002-10-31 09:15 · Score: 1

so you're saying I should pay a beaver to go do my CIS lab for me?
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by spitzak · 2002-10-31 09:58 · Score: 2

Although I agree that open source is the only way to come up with a truly cheat-proof system, there is a serious problem with using it here.

If you assumme altering the clients is difficult then you may be able to rely on slight differences between the real clients and cheating clients to send data that will only work in the real clients. This can be done without changing the clients.

However in a open-source solution it is far too easy for the cheaters to see what difference you are exploiting between the real and cheating clients, and modify the cheating client to emulate the difference. So any real fix will require all the clients to be replaced with new ones that do the new trick that makes the cheat impossible. Updating all the clients this way would require the entire system to be stopped.

The closed-source one will fail eventually when there is no way to distinguish a cheater from a real client. In that case it is just as hard to update things as the open-source one. However this may happen later.
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by spitzak · 2002-10-31 10:24 · Score: 2

Good idea. Mostly people said that the result should include some code that requires running the entire test to calculate. But to test if that returned code is correct requires the same amount of time. Instead maybe it could calculate 5 or 10 (or more) independent codes, somehow designed so you calculate all of them as a side-effect of doing the real calculation, but where any one of them can be calculated in 1/5 or 1/10 (or less) of the total time. The checker can then just calculate a random one and is thus much faster than the client.
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 11:28 · Score: 0

Umm, at least in proper ANSI C/C++, int main() with a return value is REQUIRED. So void main() is always incorrect.
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by bogado · 2002-10-31 22:30 · Score: 2

Public keys are generated by the client, since for every public key there is a secret one. The system would only have to check if there is already a user with the same public key. much like the same test that is made today for every register engine on the web does for logins.

Witch packets each user receives is compleatly out of control of the user, since it is the server who picks witch packet it will send to each user.

Also I am not aware of what exactly the SETI@Home client does with the data, but I am pretty shure that it process the data and reply with a packect of processed data and not just a bit of "interesting"/"not interesting".

--
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by ComputerSlicer23 · 2002-11-01 05:22 · Score: 2

Sorry, I'd just gotten done ready up on the distributed.net article on the same subject. SETI@Home does have more information the interesting versus not interesting (RC5-64 doesn't). You can have the client generate a key, but now you've made it trival for me to generate as many public/private key pairs to overwhelm the checking routine.
As I've explained in several other posts in this thread. Now I can DOS the thing by generating hundreds of thousands of keys, and generate 2-3 bogus WU results's for them. Now send them in. They talk in the article about the highest team ever having only 8Million, accumlated over the course of years. I can easily generate that many which have to be checked by the trusted system to ensure the blocks I've done are correct.
Once I start doing this, the project will have to shut the checking system down. Either, I'll ensure no one ever gets to put any WU's thru because I've created a huge backlog of work that will never get caught up, or the checking system will become the bottleneck and there's no point in having a distributed system. Remember SETI@Home works the way it does because it's the only way to accomplish the processing. They don't do it because it's cool, or sexy. They do it because there's no other way to get it done.
The other problem is, you'd have to randomly check people's work. Otherwise I could simple do 10 WU's have my account verified as "trusted" and then start spewing bogus data at you. The checker has the slight advantage that because I'd be turning in such huge number of WU's I'm more likely to be randomly selected be verified.
As a percentage, I can also virtually sure I can get all the work units to come to me so I can check them under several private keys. While it's controlled by SETI at home, assuming I have enough bandwidth, I can write a client that requests huge number of work units. Because I'm not wasting any time actually doing the work on them, I could probably request 90% of the WU's that are given out in any single day assuming I have enough bandwidth. So I'd get de facto control over the answers turned in.
It'd be a big pain in the ass, but if I really felt like doing it, I could probably pull it off.
Thanks, Kirby
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by anonymous_wombat · 2002-11-01 06:11 · Score: 2

Closed source isn't like sealing a tank. It is more like building a beaver-dam?
Why would anyone want to dam the beavers? Shouldn't they be allowed to run freely?
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ? by bogado · 2002-11-01 11:02 · Score: 2

Shure you can do the same DOS atack now, better only registring one time. This DOS atack could be easily diminished by only accepting the second WU from a newly register acount after verification. There could even be a set of precalculated WU only for the first time. But my point is that the olnly reason people are cheating is to get high scores, if your acount is terminated after a few cheats you can never get a high score.

The problem with SETI@Home is that they must trust the client, and this will never, I repeat, never, be safe. I do believe that all WU should be identifyed with a hash that takes into acount the key for witch user it was destined, this would make it a peace of cake to verify if the WU was not from the original user.

And as for randomly checking WUs, as stated before you should choose this WUs biased, based on witch acounts and groups have a higer rate of finished WUs.

--
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq

Re:whyd they by flippet · 2002-10-31 00:06 · Score: 0

Put in Slashdot-ese...

1. Cheat at Seti@Home; build up loads of units
2. Sell units on eBay (it does happen...)
3. ???
4. Profit!

Phil, just me

--
"Cattle Prods solve most of life's little problems."

SETI Checking? by rabiteman · 2002-10-31 00:09 · Score: 5, Insightful

From the article:
One common technique used by cheats is to distribute partially completed work units to other team members' SETI@home accounts. One account is used to process a work unit until it is 99 per cent complete. It is then distributed hundreds of other team members who process the remaining portion of the unit and return it. The WU is credited to their accounts vastly inflating the quantity of public processing that appear to be dedicated to the project.

Let's assume cheating is going on, and is being perpetrated in this manner. Why doesn't SETI@Home check each WU as it's submitted and say "Gee, here's hundreds of people from the same team submitting the same WU with the same result within minutes of each other. Seems awful suspicious!"

Seems awful suspicious.

--
Oh cruel fate, to be thusly boned! Ask not for whom the bone bones; it bones for thee. -Bender

Re:SETI Checking? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 00:23 · Score: 0

Why doesn't SETI@Home check each WU as it's submitted...
Yeah --- how come features don't magically appear in software the minute the need for them is perceived?
Re:SETI Checking? by phragle · 2002-10-31 00:24 · Score: 5, Informative

Seti does check,

As I understand it, for each unitl they send a number of redundant units out and then compare the evetual results taking the most popular result to be the correct result for that unit.
Re:SETI Checking? by rabiteman · 2002-10-31 00:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

As I understand it, for each unitl they send a number of redundant units out and then compare the evetual results taking the most popular result to be the correct result for that unit.
Even if this is the case, the point remains that one group handing in 300 redundant copies of the same data processed the same way will skew the results. What if the guy who processed the first 99% had some kind of screwup along the way, and his team hands in 300 copies of his screwed-up data? The other 3 people who got the same WU and got the right answer will be 'outvoted' by Team Cheater, ruining the whole effort (for that particular chunk of raw data, at any rate).

--
Oh cruel fate, to be thusly boned! Ask not for whom the bone bones; it bones for thee. -Bender
Re:SETI Checking? by phragle · 2002-10-31 00:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

from the seti FAQ http://setifaq.org/faq.txt 2.4 I heard I was getting the same work unit as everyone else. Is the program wasting my time? Nope, because the only time you're giving it is time your computer would have wasted anyway. Yes, early in the program there were times when the same work units went out over and over, due to overloading of the SETI@home servers that were supposed to be making new ones to send out. (They didn't expect half a million people to sign up, and they don't have enough staff or computing power to keep up with it.) And since then, the same work units are still sent out to several people, for various reasons (for instance, more than half the people who signed up have never returned their work units, and probably dropped out) But new work units are being sent out too, so just leave your SETI@home program working and it'll take care of the details. Note: If workunits are sent out multiple times, they can be doublechecked by SETI@home.
Re:SETI Checking? by Zocalo · 2002-10-31 01:27 · Score: 4, Insightful

I don't know about Seti@Home, but if I were designing the WU submission / verification procedure, I'd be looking for anomalous submissions and verifying them on my own, trusted hardware. That includes all high positives and any units where you management DB is reporting a data validation mismatches - like more units returned than dispatched.
Ultimately the league tables are just a bit of fun to entice more people into getting involved, Seti@Home probably doesn't care about who leads the tables in the slightest, only about getting a result. As long as they are confident that a positive result will not slip by unnoticed, why get involved in an resource wasting arms race with the cheaters?

--
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Re:SETI Checking? by friscolr · 2002-10-31 02:22 · Score: 2

Why doesn't SETI@Home check each WU as it's submitted and say "Gee, here's hundreds of people from the same team submitting the same WU with the same result within minutes of each other. Seems awful suspicious!"
they should make note of each work unit that goes out, and make sure it comes back from the same account. if the same account returns the same unit more than X times, it would be abusive but wouldnt cause any harm nor be added to the totals for that account.
i suppose you could then cheat by getting a shitload of WU's (a few million?) and comparing to the millions of WU's your friend got, split the same ones and send them both in once processed. if the total pool of WU's is large enough, this should be rather impratical or should at least be easily spotted.

--
-f
www.blackant.net
Re:SETI Checking? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 02:25 · Score: 0

how come features don't magically appear in software the minute the need for them is perceived?
You mean this doesn't happen in your software?
You must be one of those windows users. Try open source sometime.
Re:SETI Checking? by Coplan · 2002-10-31 02:51 · Score: 5, Interesting

Simple solution...
Seti should track what it hands out (and I'm sure it probably does). In fact, it should probably track to who it sends it (again, it probably does).
If Seti sends out 30 WUs (abroad), it should know that if it gets 200 back, a flag should be sent up. If seti sends a WU to Bob, but not to Gregg, and Gregg sends THAT WU back, the one returned from Gregg should be voided.
This is not about preventing competition. Screw that...Seti shouldn't be concerned about this issue relative to that. Seti's concern should be plain and simple -- it should be protecting the integrity of the data. 'Nuff Said.
Re:SETI Checking? by ninjadoug · 2002-10-31 03:22 · Score: 2, Insightful

why should they care anyway. It's not like the points actually mean anything. This is like all those people who complain about 'Karma Whores'. Let them cheat, in fact give them a million points, just worry about the data I say
Re:SETI Checking? by Fastolfe · 2002-10-31 06:32 · Score: 1

looking for anomalous submissions and verifying them on my own, trusted hardware

Take this a step further, have each client generate a hash based on the processed data somehow. If they did the work they were originally designed to do, you could take the same work unit from another participant and it should have the same hash. If there are any "suspect" work units, or if multiple submissions of the same work unit, you could compare the hashes against each other, or your own test case, and incorrect hashes means someone tampered with the work unit or is attempting to cheat. I'd then re-examine all of their work units and potentially drop all of their contributions. *shrug*..
Re:SETI Checking? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 08:50 · Score: 0

Okay... I'd like presentation software that's as powerful and easy to use as PowerPoint.
Hmmm... okay, I'm waiting.... hmmm..

Ahem. by acehole · 2002-10-31 00:21 · Score: 5, Insightful

This has been going on for as long as seti@home has been running.

There are a variety of excuses people have for doing such things, such as :-

* making the program calculate units faster
* falsifying unit completion and results
* hoping they cheat enough so they can get up the top of a table

These people dont realise the problems with doing such things, If you contaminate the results with fraudulant and false data then you might as well forget about the whole project.

What happens if there really was something found, but due to the high rate of contamination that it was thought to be too good to be true and discarded. Consequences really need to be thought out before you start wrecking the hardwork of scientists and academics who are only doing a service for everyone's benefit.

--
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!

Re:Ahem. by rgsmith · 2002-10-31 00:35 · Score: 1

I concur.

However, the competitive nature of man is what drives this project... seriously, don't you think that everyone who installs the SETI@Home client dreams of being 'the one' who computes the package that proves the existence of extraterrestrial life? Without this, or perhaps the dream of having your computer be the one that discovers the cure for cancer, or any of the other distributed computing project's goals - your level of participation will be quite low. ...so, you have to plan your project with this in mind... dangle the carrot in front of the rabbit, but ENSURE that they can't actually get to it and eat it.
Re:Ahem. by taviso · 2002-10-31 00:39 · Score: 5, Informative

one of the major culprits for this was actually Microsoft, they had a scam going where they optimized the SETI software for Windows and then published the results to show how well their platform performed.

Theres more information in the setifaq, section 1.3.6

and on this usenet thread.

its a very interesting topic.

--
ex$$
Re:Ahem. by IIRCAFAIKIANAL · 2002-10-31 01:38 · Score: 4, Interesting

What happens if there really was something found, but due to the high rate of contamination that it was thought to be too good to be true and discarded. Consequences really need to be thought out before you start wrecking the hardwork of scientists and academics who are only doing a service for everyone's benefit.

Not that I disagree with you overall, but if they thought they found something but the results were contaminated, they would just reprocess them. Now, what we should worry about is something being overlooked...

--
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Re:Ahem. by Martin+S. · 2002-10-31 01:57 · Score: 2

one of the major culprits for this was actually Microsoft, they had a scam going where they optimized the SETI software for Windows and then published the results to show how well their platform performed.

Much as I hate Microsoft, and would love to find them guilty, this is not cheating. It just minimising their natural disadvantage.
Re:Ahem. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 02:28 · Score: 0

dangle the carrot in front of the rabbit, but ENSURE that they can't actually get to it and eat it.
i ate a carrot once. my eyes felt a lot better afterwards but the fishhook hurt my mouth.
Re:Ahem. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 02:42 · Score: 0

No, you should read the links too, rather than just make up your own conclusion.

The SETI people disallowed the data because they couldn't veryify that MS's implementation was actually correct.
Re:Ahem. by AnotherBlackHat · 2002-10-31 08:33 · Score: 2

One of the major culprits for this was actually Microsoft, they had a scam going where they optimized the SETI software for Windows and then published the results to show how well their platform performed.

That attitude by SETI was my major reason for not participating in SETI@home.
When they started asking on sci.crypt if there was some way they could guarantee that only their client had performed the calculations,
the question that naturally arose was "why the client, and not the data?".
The answer provided shows that they were not (and still aren't) interested in proving the calculations are correct.

For what it's worth, the solution to the checking problem is actually straight forward.
Force the client to periodically calculate the MD5 hash of all the intermediate results (basically an image of ram) + the last MD5 sum calculated.
Each block computed then returns the result (usually nothing interesting) and the MD5 sum.

-- this is not a .sig
Re:Ahem. by Coffee · 2002-10-31 09:24 · Score: 1

I actually happened to be working for them when this happened. Sun, for example, had gotten a source license to SETI@home, and had rewritten some of the more laughably terrible portions of the client to make it faster. They, of course, were using these results as unofficial "proof" that Solaris was faster than Windows.

One of the bright chaps at Microsoft noticed that the FFT DLL was dog slow. So he replaced it with a faster, equally accurate FFT library. A while later, the MS team got an email from SETI@home demanding the source code back. They were somewhat nonplussed when the MS SETI team told them that they didn't have any source.

Yes, the concern SETI stated was that the team was chewing through blocks too quickly and consuming all the data. But realistically, that isn't a huge problem. If the data gets processed, it gets processed. The goal is to determine one way or the other if there is anything interesting in a block, not just to use idle cycles from now until the end of time.

When we heard through the team that SETI had issued a cease and desist of using the client, we all more or less agreed that it was their toys and they could take them away if they wanted to, but we also more or less agreed that if SETI@home was going to demand that people run intentionally crippled clients for political benefit rather than scientific benefit, then the entire SETI goal was not really being pursued by the fine folks at SETI@home.

I don't run the client any more, although I think it would be neat if we found ETI. There's obviously no point.

If you're intending to flame me for something, please choose something more interesting that "You suck because you worked for Microsoft." Also: this was long ago, and in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.
Re:Ahem. by spitzak · 2002-10-31 10:15 · Score: 2

What the client several files? It sounds like the FFT DLL would be a seperate file. Why did they do this? If they want to obscure the code getting rid of symbols in a shared library would be a very good idea. Otherwise it is just like getting the source.

I am also suprised that you were able to figure out what the arguments to the DLL functions were. Ones I have seen take dozens of arguments, or large structures, and accidentally swapping x and y could result in it not working. Or did you decompile the DLL? Or did you really have the source code.

In any case SETI could easily prove your implementation worked by running the same block of data through both versions. Why they would not accept an improved Windows client is a mystery.
Re:Ahem. by Coffee · 2002-10-31 11:25 · Score: 1

It sounds like the FFT DLL would be a seperate file. Why did they do this? If they want to obscure the code getting rid of symbols...

The FFT DLL was seperate, but distributed with the client (at least, it was, at the time, if I remember correctly). I no longer run Windows or SETI@home, so I dunno if this has changed. As to why it was a DLL? I have no idea.

I am also suprised that you were able to figure out what the arguments to the DLL functions were.

The person (who wasn't me) who figured out that the FFT DLL was the problem was a wizardly coder, and I have no clue how he did it, but he did - I ran the client with the new DLL and it was way faster.

Why they would not accept an improved Windows client is a mystery.

The only reason we could come up with for not taking our blocks was that they were mad that the client had been improved without their blessing. Like I said, they're welcome to keep their toys, but if the goal for their Windows client is that it run as terribly as possible, then heck, I'm not going to run any of their clients.
Re:Ahem. by DJ-Pandemic · 2002-10-31 14:50 · Score: 1

It has been quite some time since I've ran SETI, but here is what I noticed about the program. There are two threads in the application.. One runs the graphics you see on the screen, the other actually crunches the numbers.... The graphics you see on the screen are nothing but absolute random crap just to make your computer look productive. The only legitimate thing that I've found to boost productivity was to change the priority on the threads. Changing the graphic one to low and the number crunching thread to high or very high if you're running the machine dedicated. End result was about a 30-40% increase in unit processing speed.
Re:Ahem. by spitzak · 2002-10-31 17:11 · Score: 2

Actually I remember a lot of complaining here that the Linux client worked worse than the Windows one, so it sounds like they didn't care about anybody.

Cheating != Satisfaction by Lefty2446 · 2002-10-31 00:28 · Score: 1

Why oh why can't these people be happy whith the real and honest work they do for the project?

Cheating, result stuffing, whatever you want to call it does nothing but diminish the overall value of the scientific work being done.

The fact that the SETI group does nothing about this is confusing to me.

Re:Cheating != Satisfaction by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 05:06 · Score: 0

> Why oh why can't these people be happy whith the real and honest work they do for the project?

You misunderstand their goal; they aren't in it to do real and honest work for the project, they're in it solely to win the game.

S@h would have been much better off never having added Any game or contest-like elements to their process. People get the client and it runs - period. No rankings, no scorings, nothing of that sort at all. If the gamers can't win they won't participate and screw up the works just for the sake of winning.
Re:Cheating != Satisfaction by jridley · 2002-10-31 05:50 · Score: 2

These people don't give a rat's ass about the science, they're just trying to win the geek tractor pull and if they have to use illegal fuel or slash the other guy's tires, they'll do it.

Buncha f***in a**h*les. *I* am in it for the science. I'm not a huge contributor but I do what I can, and am approaching 10K work units. I'd hate to think that all the work units me and thousands of other people have done over the years are going to have to be thrown out because these jerks were just trying to win the game.

I don't see how anyone gets satisfaction out of winning by cheating, but obviously they must. To me you're just proving you can figure out how to cheat and don't really care about the project.

Maybe they could salvage the science by throwing out any results from anyone that submitted more than (name some number, like 100,000) work units, thereby eliminating a great number of cheaters.
Re:Cheating != Satisfaction by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 06:54 · Score: 0

But there is not even sexy babes involved. A babe is not going to give a flying fudge if you aced a CPU contest. Find something more glamorous to cheat on, idiots! Hack into a Farari alarm or something.
Re:Cheating != Satisfaction by sakeneko · 2002-10-31 06:55 · Score: 1

Maybe they could salvage the science by throwing out any results from anyone that submitted more than (name some number, like 100,000) work units, thereby eliminating a great number of cheaters.

Yeah. The problem is, that will throw out a huge amount of honest work by people who only wanted to help with the science too. I'm not at 100,000 yet, but I'm close and might well reach it by the time the competition closes. I've been doing this for over three years, though, and currently have four computers running SETI packets. (Two of them with at least 90% of their capacity going to SETI.)

It should be possible to come up with some formula, though, that will catch wildly improbable reported results, perhaps by dumping any results where a user reports more than twenty or forty different results in a single day?

--
Catherine

This can't be that big of a problem by terraformer · 2002-10-31 00:28 · Score: 1

I have not had seti running for 6 months and am currently in 95 percentile. Before that I was running it occasionaly on a PII 400 mHz NT4 machine. Anyhow, who cares??? I have better things to worry about than people who are in a race to be the first to not discover alien life...

--
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.

Re:This can't be that big of a problem by LordKronos · 2002-10-31 00:40 · Score: 3, Insightful

Yeah, but if they are also submitting corrupt work units (it is unknown whether or not they are), and these corrupted work units cause a false negative, we could have easily already discovered alien life and not even know it. Not likely, but still possible.

Allowing something like this to go on just undermines all credibility of the project. I'm sure a lot of people would be turned away from participating in SETI@Home 2 (if/when it happens) if they know that this type of stuff is going on. I mean, this is something that has been explicitly brought to the admins attention, and they are just ignoring it. What would make anyone think they are going to take a proactive role in seeing that this type of stuff doesn't happen in the future?
Re:This can't be that big of a problem by terraformer · 2002-10-31 00:59 · Score: 3, Interesting

Fair enough on the corruption point. I understand however, the position of the admins who are near the end of the project and have very few resources left. Although the overwhelming support they have received from the public for their work is a blessing, it has been a curse too. The more users they got, the more money they had to spend to support them (although cost per user has probably gone down). I would not be surprised that the whole project is being run by Grad students right now and the university would probably lend support for any big catastrophes should they occur.

They are probably unable to cope at this point, so near the end, to deal with it real time. There is nothing to prevent them from going in later to adjust and obviously, any published work based on the project will have to deal with the issue. As for the future, you have a point that the public at large may take exception with this and feel any future work is comprimised but people tend to have short memories.

I would imagine that the Seti@HomeII project will deal with this issue as they are going to need to distribute new software anyway. They could easily come up with a mechanism similar to that used by software publishers who tie their registration id to the hardware. This way the work units can't be transferred from machine to machine. I just can't see them pulling this off in the next few months.

--
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.

I might feel like a loser at times, but... by ClassicG · 2002-10-31 00:30 · Score: 5, Funny

all I need to do to feel better about myself is to remember that there are people out there who are so bad that they need to cheat at Seti@Home in order to feel like something worth anything.

--
I game, therefore I am...

Join Team Lamb Chop? by LordKronos · 2002-10-31 00:32 · Score: 2, Interesting

With SETI@Home, if you arean't already part of a team, can't you join a team and give them credit for all of your previously completed work units? With the project coming to a close, maybe we could all join Team Lamb Chop and give them a boost to keep them ahead of these cheaters.

Re:Join Team Lamb Chop? by TekReggard · 2002-10-31 05:44 · Score: 1

I'm with Lord Kronos! Take Action! If SETI@Home Admins wont do anything we can at least give the winning team the edge they need to stay ahead! :-D :)
Re:Join Team Lamb Chop? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 08:00 · Score: 0

Yes, I thought of that and already did join. I wonder how Lam-chops membership will swell in responce. Hopefully with Ligit non-cheaters to show the cheaters how fruitless their efforts are.

Our experiences from running the rc5-56 challenge by jukal · 2002-10-31 00:34 · Score: 5, Interesting

run at cyberian.org some 4 years ago was that people will do anything to get their team/name listed in the first page of the statistics. Some of the people were even arrested by police for hacking into machines to make them crunch rc5 for their name. And it seems this trend is only getting worse. This is kind of sad, because it is not very good for the reputation of such efforts.

it's been happening by jokrswild · 2002-10-31 00:35 · Score: 5, Insightful

as a participant of the Seti@Home project, this has been happening for some time. For those familiar, check out the stats for Overclockers.com Seti Team, of which i'm a member (insert a "Crunch for us!" flag here). We've suspected our number 1 memeber of cheating, but we have no proof. His numbers as of late were usually 0, until a few of our other memebers caught up. His Work Unit production started being upwards 300 or 400 a day.

People tend to loose sight of the fact that Seti@Home is for scientific purposes, and get caught up in the statisitics of it all. I'm in to the statisitics, so i'll load more computers with the Seti@Home client, not cheat.

Re:it's been happening by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 02:50 · Score: 0

His numbers as of late were usually 0, until a few of our other memebers caught up. His Work Unit production started being upwards 300 or 400 a day.
for how long was his production zero? he may have been saving up work units during that time.
Re:it's been happening by MarkGriz · 2002-10-31 03:12 · Score: 1

People tend to loose sight of the fact that Seti@Home is for scientific purposes, and get caught up in the statisitics of it all.
Perhaps it is time that these distributed computing projects made the statistics a bit more anonymous, to weed out the ego-strokers. That way, the people participating would be doing so purely for the scientific purposes, and would have no motivation for cheating.
Sure, that might turn away some people, but it would go a long way toward making the results more accurate.

--
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Re:it's been happening by agallagh42 · 2002-10-31 03:49 · Score: 1

That doesn't necessarily imply cheating. When I used to cruch for team Matroxusers, I had a handful of quad-xeon boxes running, and routinely got 100-150 WU/day. If I had put Seti on all the boxes I have access too, I could easily ramp up to >500/day.

Maybe that guy just has intermittent access to a server farm or something...

--
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Re:it's been happening by jokrswild · 2002-10-31 11:15 · Score: 1

well, there is alot more to it, and I dont' really want to go into the entire story. That was just an overview. I've run Seti in the Computer labs I have access to, and we did 600 in one day (that was a really nice day for us.. :-D ) But the fact remains that some people do cheat, and there are many ways of doing it..

Re:whyd they by Zathruss · 2002-10-31 00:40 · Score: 1

How the heck do you sell Seti@home work units, and more to the point, why would you want to? My mind boggles.

Google Toolbar version. by hopbine · 2002-10-31 00:40 · Score: 3, Interesting

I havent seen any /. comments about the Google version of this. My office computer runs IE and has a Google toolbar. The other day it downloaded a trial version of combined computing, in this case the computing was to be on behalf of the "Folding@Home Distributed Computing" I wonder if Google will be hacked.

--
Semper ubi sub ubi

Re:whyd they by simong_oz · 2002-10-31 00:44 · Score: 5, Funny

2. Sell units on eBay (it does happen...)

Wow. The depths of humanity that eBay churns up will never stop amazing me.

The saddest thing of all is not that the units are being sold, but that there are people out there buying them. GET A LIFE

--
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)

It's easy to stop. Don't publish statistics by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 00:51 · Score: 0

(other than the total work done by everyone in the project). People doing it for the right reasons don't care where they sit in the stats.

Re:It's easy to stop. Don't publish statistics by logic7 · 2002-10-31 01:25 · Score: 1

Participating in a project like this isn't simply about good reasons and bad reasons. I guess that many participants like both the competition *and* being involved in a project thats useful for the public.

Not publishing statistics would (of course) scare those people off. and even those just interested in helping the SETI project may still want to see statistics, because statistics are cool. :-)

Ironcly by isorox · 2002-10-31 01:01 · Score: 4, Interesting

I'm researching seti for a final year comp sci project, and I've just handed in a draft about how its been secure, but how my distributed foobar will be open, and therfore more secure.

(dunno how to make it secure yet though)

Cheating is a big thing, as you can sell your work units on ebay!

500 units @ 25 euros
and http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&it em=2064169353 and
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem& it em=2064990327

Re:Ironcly by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-01 05:32 · Score: 0

Here is another one:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIte m&item =2066400505

what about peer review? by caveat · 2002-10-31 01:02 · Score: 5, Insightful

if i were one of the reviewers of this work for publication, and i even heard a whisper about cheating, i'd pack the whole pile of results up and ship them straight back as invalid.
if this is /serious/ scientific research, there should be absolutely zero tolerance for cheating, and any team even suspected of it should be summarily disqualified and have all their results tossed - not out of fairness for the competitors, but for the simple sake of scientific integrity...you can't have people cooking the books and then expect legitimate results.

--

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley

Re:what about peer review? by Shimbo · 2002-10-31 02:13 · Score: 1

if i were one of the reviewers of this work for publication, and i even heard a whisper about cheating, i'd pack the whole pile of results up and ship them straight back as invalid.

Yes. But there won't be much interesting to publish until and unless they get a positive signal. Whilst the actions of cheaters are deplorable, in the end they aren't that significant.

Consider, there have to be enough hacked clients around to get a reasonable probablity that the same fake client get to process the data n times, getting the same bad, positive result.

Even then all that happens is that the SETI folks rerun the analysis of the segment in question on trusted machines, find there's nothing there, then go back to sleep.
Re:what about peer review? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 02:30 · Score: 0

any team even suspected of it should be summarily disqualified and have all their results tossed
all the teams are cheating. go look for it.
there, should all the results produced by teams be thrown out?
Re:what about peer review? by jridley · 2002-10-31 06:10 · Score: 2

This is simply not true. I can guarantee you that the two teams that I belong to are not cheating. Of course, the biggest one only recently topped 100K WUs for 55 members (only about 20 active members).

I think that there are a lot of people cheating, but to say that every team is cheating is not really fair. Perhaps any team over 1000 members will have a high likelihood of a cheater being in it.
Re:what about peer review? by demosthenes · 2002-10-31 07:07 · Score: 1

Actually there is valuable science in *not* getting a result after several thousand CPU-years of crunching on the data from Aricebo. It allows us to fill in or at least narrow down some numbers in the Drake equation. The fact that we haven't found anything from all of this effort so far is telling in an of itself. The main conclusion being that civlizations like ours are most likely quite rare, or short lived, at least in our block of the universe. If the results are bogus, even with a negative, we lost out on potentially valuable data. If the bogus results can not be filtered out, the entire effort would be contaminated, and the data would be useless.
Re:what about peer review? by Broccolist · 2002-11-04 16:52 · Score: 1

You seem to think that the SETI team is analyzing every possible wavelength from every part of the sky, looking for any possible pattern that might be generated by aliens. Not even close. Not getting any results tells us nothing more than that SETI wasn't looking in the right direction. There is nothing "telling" in that SETI has not found anything yet, and bogus negative results are harmless.

One possible response... by Alsee · 2002-10-31 01:03 · Score: 5, Insightful

With the competition?s close just two months away

Seti@home may just sit back and silently allow these people to continue putting work into cheating, then at the close of the copmpetition throw out all bogus results.

Sort of getting revenge by letting them waste their time for another two months.

-

--
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.

Why Cheat? by orthogonal · 2002-10-31 01:05 · Score: 5, Funny

We're cheating because some 133t script-kiddie beamed a message to your solar system, some 50,000 of your years ago.

Only by perverting your Seti@home results will we prevent you from discovering our advanced, trans-lightspeed, galaxy-spanning civilization -- and from discovering that despite our accomplishments, our civilization will fall unless we conquer your planet for water/slaves/Kentucky-Fried-Human (please pick one).

Naturally, as an Alien Commader, I must gloatingly reveal our plans, with the excuse that you puny humans are too primitive to stop us even if you do know.

PS: That Orson Welles broadcast 64 years ago today wasn't a hoax. We got to him just in time.

--
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?

Re:Why Cheat? by MartyC · 2002-10-31 01:49 · Score: 2

As Kang once said... "Your superior intellect is no match for our primitive weapons."

--
-- "Sponges grow in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen."
Re:Why Cheat? by MarkGriz · 2002-10-31 03:22 · Score: 0

Only by perverting your Seti@home results will we prevent you from discovering our advanced, trans-lightspeed, galaxy-spanning civilization
It's sad too see that even civilizations far more advanced than ours still have problems with spammers.
Oh...you said galaxy-SPANNING. Nevermind.

--
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.

I'm confused... by Frnak · 2002-10-31 01:07 · Score: 5, Funny

Wasn't seti@home just about scoring high work units?

And what is this extraterrestial stuff people are going on about?

Ramifications for other distributed projects? by Sherloqq · 2002-10-31 01:09 · Score: 3, Interesting

I wonder how this will affect other distributed projects, such as the cancer search.
Apparently any time there is a prize involved, people are willing to forgo their ethics
and the ulterior goals in favor of money. What would happen if this sort of cheating were
uncovered in the cancer project? Will it undermine its reputation and credibility, even
if only the stats were to have been sabotaged and not the results themselves? I'm sure
that people would start peeping "Well, we can't trust those results now, can we?" And all
those CPU cycles would have been wasted, after all.

--
Have EVDO, will travel.

Re:Ramifications for other distributed projects? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 05:08 · Score: 0

unlike seti these projects have goals that are verifiable. Ie we can't go across the universe to make sure that this calculation was correct, but we can develop a drug and test it on animals, or independent computer simulations to verify if it is indeed something to pursue farther.

Old news by djupedal · 2002-10-31 01:14 · Score: 2

...inflated stats were being turned in years ago. This 'cheating' is hardly new. SETI must have grown tired trying to stay ahead of it with new versions and now just turns a deaf ear.

Re:Old news by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 01:40 · Score: 1, Informative

Why does it seem someone /always/ has to play the This Is Old News card? Yippie for you dipshit, you heard about it a while ago, here's your prize. You've contributed zero. Hopefully you've at least made yourself feel better.

I will contribute something to this. Another scenario of cheating goes like so:

Set up a batch script to download multiple (like 100) work units at a time, each is 350k or so.
Another script steps through each unit, completing the work required.
When all units are done, result files are only 10k per work unit.
Prior to submitting, make a copy of the result files.
Proceed with submitting the results.

Repeat the process, except next time you're ready to submit, you can re-submit the prior 100 units as well.
As long as you maintain a copy of the completed units, you can keep submitting them.
Don't know if there's a limit on the frequency or quantity of resubmits, but your results go up exponentially: 100,200,300,500,800,1300,2100...
Re:Old news by djupedal · 2002-10-31 02:03 · Score: 1, Flamebait

Maybe because it's true. And maybe we want something more than re-heated tripe. 3 years hence, and now the so-called editors here think they've caught a rare species.

Can't you think of a more original tactic to slam me with? C'mon....I can take it. Take your time, you'll come up with something. I'm here for you & I feel your pain :)

AC seems so much the label, eh? Talk about being opportunistic.
Re:Old news by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 05:38 · Score: 0

Good try on the math there. It's linear, not exponential - you're only adding 100 to the total each time. If we went the algorithm you described in words, you'd only be submitting 200 each time after the initial 100.

It's too competitive. by pommaq · 2002-10-31 01:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

Listen to the guy in the article:
"Basically, three years of work to get to the top of the teams and eight million WU later, it looks as though the top team is going to be beaten by cheating," said Nealon.

Sure, the stats are fun. But once you make a competition of it, people are going to start cheating - doesn't matter if the only reward is seeing your name at the top of your group in some brute force number-crunching exercise. Even the legal users care mostly about where they are in the stats, not about the point of the project itself. I mean, look at the popularity of ProgressQuest.
If I were SETI@Home, I'd remove the stats. Sure, you'd lose humungous amounts of CPU power when the $r1p7 kiddies abandon the project, but if you're getting millions of WUs of flawed data sent back to you, you need to do something drastic. Besides, they've got a pretty strong brand by now, and I'm sure a lot of users would stick with them just for the good of the cause, not just for the dubious honor of being at the top of the stats.

Anti-cheating Petition by JDax · 2002-10-31 01:27 · Score: 2

You may sign here if you agree!

http://www.teamprimerib.com/seti/

--
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."

Simple solution by wowbagger · 2002-10-31 01:28 · Score: 5, Insightful

When the hand out the work unit, put a unit ID number on it, and sign it with a hash.

If they see the same ID being submitted by more than one system, zero the work unit totals for both machines.

BOOM! Cheating now carries a very high price.

--
www.eFax.com are spammers

Re:Simple solution by Fastolfe · 2002-10-31 06:41 · Score: 1

There are other ways of cheating. If you understand how the results are packaged and sent back to the server, you could pretty easily forge messages with bogus results back to the server.

You could, though, apply a similar technique with the results. Generally the processing done on each work unit is the same across each platform, right? If so, they could generate a hash based in some way on the work actually done, and send that hash back with the results. The only way to come up with that has would be to actually do the work. Since SETI@Home gives the same work unit out to multiple parties, they'd just have to raise an alarm whenever they got a hash that disagreed with someone else. If other factors raise an alarm, they could process the same work unit locally and compare its hash with what was submitted. If they can identify someone that's not giving correct hashes, then they clearly did not do the work and all of their work units could be zeroed or re-done.

If we make it just as expensive for the user to cheat as it is to actually do the work, there ceases to be value in cheating.
Re:Simple solution by Mad+Bad+Rabbit · 2002-10-31 07:31 · Score: 2

wowbagger wrote:

When the hand out the work unit, put a unit ID number on it, and sign it with a hash.

If they see the same ID being submitted by more than one system, zero the work unit totals for both machines.

This would allow anonymous losers to request a new work unit, then deliberately submit bad units for ID's 0 .. n-1, just to DOS everyone else.

>;K

--
>;k
Re:Simple solution by muon1183 · 2002-10-31 07:42 · Score: 1

I don't think you know how SETI@home works. First of all, it's pretty clear you don't even know how the program works. Every work unit is sent out to at least 3 computers so that results can be verified. However, since we send out so many workunits (as in, we can clog a 100 Mbit pipe, and these workunits aren't exactly huge), the system may send a workunit out more than the minumum amount of times. So a workunit may be sent out more times than necessary, but won't be sent out less times than necessary. If we aren't splitting tapes fast enough to keep up with demand, workunits will be sent to more people. We do this, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to satisfy the demands of the users, and redundancy is good. It's simply not worth our time to be going after every suspected case of cheating (as in, we have better things to do, especially since there's only a few of us). Now, on to all of the flamebait about open source. The infrastructure for the next generation of SETI@home, BOINC is open source. In fact, we would like your help on it looking for bugs and security holes. So if you want to help, visit http://boinc.ssl.berkeley.edu and help find bugs in our code. Thanks, Mike Gary Berkeley SETI project

--

There's no sig like SIGSEG
Re:Simple solution by wowbagger · 2002-10-31 08:01 · Score: 3

No, they wouldn't - that's why the hash is there.

Only Seti can create the hash.

--
www.eFax.com are spammers
Re:Simple solution by wowbagger · 2002-10-31 08:10 · Score: 2

You missed my point - the ID would be unique not just to the contents of the work unit, but to the actual send of the work unit.

In other words, if you send me work unit #123, containing a set of data, you sign it with a random number, say 426931. You ALSO hash the data in such a fashion that I cannot forge it.

Now, if you send George the same work unit #123, you sign it with a different random number and hash.

Now, when I return the unit, I return the work unit ID (123), the random number (426931), and hash. You check it, and if they don't match you can bounce me.

If I musketeer my 99% done work unit to Paul, Ringo, and Steve, when they return it you see a match not only on the work unit number (123) but on the random number and hash. Bounce, Bounce, Bounce.

If it is not worth the time to catch cheaters, then it is not worth the time to BITCH about cheaters.

--
www.eFax.com are spammers
Re:Simple solution by Mad+Bad+Rabbit · 2002-10-31 08:49 · Score: 2

Good point.

Another thought: you could prevent "ditching"
(cheaters who just return false without really
doing the work) by occasionally handing out an
inspection unit (for example, one of the known
false positives, plus added random noise so a
malicious client can't tell it's an inspection
without doing the whole computation). If they
fail a couple of these, mark all previous and
future results from that client as bad.

>;K

--
>;k

Bah... by elixx · 2002-10-31 01:29 · Score: 0

Nealon says that would mean team members producing this much work must have 1250GHz of processing power at their disposal dedicated purely to the project. In human terms, thatâ(TM)s around 1,250 1GHz computers doing nothing but running the SETI@home screensaver.

Apparently humans aren't capable of basic division...

I was a little annoyed a handful of other details, but I don't feel like disecting the article...

--
No, Beowulf clusters can't imagine in Soviet Russia.

Re:Bah... by grahamlee · 2002-10-31 01:44 · Score: 1

Actually, to do "nothing but [run] the SETI@home screensaver", a computer also has to load Windows, a VGA (at least) device driver, HDD drivers, etc. So "1250GHz of processing power...dedicated purely to the project" would require somewhere closer to 1300 1GHz computers, IMHO. You've also got to consider the architecture of those computers; PowerPC running at 1GHz!=IA32 running at 1GHz!=Z80 running at 1GHz etc.

*sigh* by R-2-RO · 2002-10-31 01:29 · Score: 1

Argh! Damn cheaters! Do they actually feel some sense of accomplishment? I don't see how since Seti isn't about raw number crunching. *sigh* I will never understand what 'fun' they get out of cheating especially in online gaming.. but that's another story.

--
Thank you. Drive through. (:wq)

EVIDENCE ? by Martin+S. · 2002-10-31 01:44 · Score: 2

It seems to me the claims of cheating are just speculation, there is no evidence beyond the reported fact that a 'leading' team has emerged. Indeed the 'cheat' as descibed of bringing more machines to bear on the problem does not seem like cheating to me. It looks like bad loosers to me. It certainly has no negative impact on the scientific integrity of the resuls as some have suggested.

Re:EVIDENCE ? by JDax · 2002-10-31 01:59 · Score: 3, Informative

The problem is not "bringing more machines to bear". A big issue has to do with those purposely re-submitting the same, already-processed results, over and over again, without ever having or needing to download a new WU.

Read this thread and this one and do try to follow the links to the graphs showing the suspicious results.

And do sign the petition against cheating here.

--
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Re:EVIDENCE ? by Martin+S. · 2002-10-31 06:32 · Score: 2

I've read a good few links and whilst there seems to be lots of speculation. I can see _no_evidence_ of cheating. Increases in productivity has many possible explainations, new machines, additional machines, renewed efforts, new members, etc.
Re:EVIDENCE ? by JDax · 2002-10-31 06:52 · Score: 2

But did you bother to read the links I posted? This latest issue has been researched for at least a year and was initially brought to light back in August when the loopholes were privately brought to SETI's attention.

The Netherlands has a population of 16,000,000. Roughly the population of Florida. So you actually believe that the highest producing 10 accounts alone on that single team (SETI@NL), some of whom suddenly became new members in October, are legitimately outproducing the ENTIRE combined daily output of the top 5 teams in SETI? So you do not find it unusual that those 10 mentioned produced 65,000 results in a single day? You do the math (there's alot of math done in those threads).

Even the poor SETI@NL Team founder has admitted that there is nothing he can do about them because Founders are given no admin privileges to kick suspicious accounts off a team and the SETI project leaders have never responded to his inquiries about the accounts.

--
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."

SETI will fail... by little1973 · 2002-10-31 01:44 · Score: 1

I do not want to sound Trollish, but SETI is a complete waste of time, IMHO. I believe the aliens do not use radio waves for communication for the sole reason that radio waves are just too slow.

Just calculate the time which is needed for light to cover the distance between Sun and Earth. It's 8 minutes and the Sun is just 150 million km away. I think there is a more advanced communication mechanism which waits for us to discover, because radio waves are clearly unusable for great distances.

--
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises

Re:SETI will fail... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 02:24 · Score: 0

Uh, thats not the point. The point is that they may have used one of the wavelengths at some point in their civilization and the broadcasts are just now reaching us, allowing us to detect that they exist. Much like how our television broadcasts are sent in to space, and an alien civilization might catch an episode of I Love Lucy, and think, "Where the fuck did this come from?"
Re:SETI will fail... by Contact · 2002-10-31 02:41 · Score: 5, Insightful

You're assuming a hypothetical "alien race" which operates on the same sort of timescales that we do. If they "live" a few orders of magnitude more slowly, then radio waves suddenly become (to them) a few orders of magnitude faster...
Bear in mind that even amongst cultures on earth, perceptions of timescales vary. I've heard the phrase "In Europe they think 100 miles is a long way; In America they think 100 years is a long time". Imposing human values on a hypothetical alien race is somewhat anthropomorphic...
Re:SETI will fail... by Dexter's+Laboratory · 2002-10-31 03:01 · Score: 1

Well if they are going to contact us, isn't it likely that they will be on the safe side regarding us knowing how to pick up the message? Radio should be the most basic form of communication in space.
Re:SETI will fail... by Civil_Disobedient · 2002-10-31 03:10 · Score: 1

Well, if the alien civilization is reasonably advanced, they'll realize that not every world out there is as advanced as they are, and might beam "low-tech" alternative messages across the universe for the fledgling races that still haven't figured out how to get off their own planets. We did something like this with Voyager, broadcasting some basic information about us to anyone listening.

Anyway, they might also be using some ultra-fast wormhole/subspace method of communicating (substitute your own sci-fi gadget -- you get the idea), but it's not like we'd know, since we still haven't built any receivers to pick it up.
Re:SETI will fail... by magarity · 2002-10-31 03:34 · Score: 1

"aliens do not use radio waves for communication"

It doesn't have to be radio waves sent for communication. The aricebo radio telescope has an active mode used for radar scanning of solar planets. The massive burst put out will be easily detectable by any alien version of SETI@Home 60 or more light years out. While not communication, these hypothetical aliens would know that some artificial source is blasting out radio frequency energy. And while radio is, as you point out, entirely too slow for meaningful communication over such time, just KNOWING other thinking creatures are out there is the important part.
Re:SETI will fail... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 04:05 · Score: 0

Your point is somewhat valid, but for the most part, the logic just doesn't work. Radiowaves stand out much more clearly against interstellar noise than radiation in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Using your logic, I could just as easily argue 'imagine an alien race that weighss 1/12 as much as us. They wouldn't be carbon-based, because carbon would, to them, appear to be so much heavier.'
Re:SETI will fail... by dfeist · 2002-10-31 04:30 · Score: 1

Yes, and surely, Einstein was wrong. There is no limitation for the velocity in which information can be transmitted... Don't you realise that after all current theories, the fastest way to communicate are electromagnetic waves? No kind of matter can be faster. And I think it's improbable that the basics of our physics knowledge are wrong. So, information can only be transmitted at light speed.

--
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
Re:SETI will fail... by Bitsy+Boffin · 2002-10-31 10:33 · Score: 2

I do not want to sound Trollish, but SETI is a complete waste of time, IMHO. I believe the aliens do not use radio waves for communication for the sole reason that radio waves are just too slow.
Why should they not ? If ET is at a similar or lesser technology level to ourselves then radio wave is the best they have. And if they are at a greater tech level, it seems plausible that they had to pass through a time when they only knew about radio transmission and like us spewed copious amounts of it into the galaxy from thier planet(s).
SETI isn't necessarily looking for a "Greetings People Of Earth" message, more likely they would find an innocuous radio level broadcast akin to a radio or television show :-)

--
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
Re:SETI will fail... by Le+Marteau · 2002-10-31 10:48 · Score: 1

No kind of matter can be faster.

Not entirely correct. Einstein's equations only demonstrate that matter cannot travel AT the speed of light because the equations divide by zero at exactly light speed . His equations do not demonstrate that greater than light travel is impossible.

The catch is, of course, how do you go greater than light without passing the speed of light.

--
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Re:SETI will fail... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 11:05 · Score: 0

Tachyons
Tachyons are purely speculative particles, which are presumed to travel faster than
light. According to Einstein's equations of special relativity, a particle
with an imaginary rest mass and a velocity greater than c would have a real
momentum and energy. Ironically, the greater the kinetic energy of a
tachyon, the slower it travels, approaching c asymptotically (from above) as
its energy approaches infinity. Alternatively, a tachyon losing kinetic
energy travels faster and faster, until as the kinetic energy approaches
zero, the speed of the tachyon approaches infinity; such a tachyon with zero
energy and infinite speed is called transcendent.
Special relativity does not seem to specifically exclude tachyons, so long
as they do not cross the lightspeed barrier and do not interact with other
particles to cause causality violations. Quantum mechanical analyses of
tachyons indicate that even though they travel faster than light they would
not be able to carry information faster than light, thus failing to violate
causality. But in this case, if tachyons are by their very nature
indetectable, it brings into question how real they might be.

Tachyon paradox
The argument demonstrating that tachyons (should they exist, of course)
cannot carry an electric charge. For a (imaginary-massed) particle
travelling faster than c, the less energy the tachyon has, the faster it
travels, until at zero energy the tachyon is travelling with infinite
velocity, or is transcendent. Now a charged tachyon at a given
(non-infinite) speed will be travelling faster than light in its own medium,
and should emit Cherenkov radiation. The loss of this energy will naturally
reduce the energy of the tachyon, which will make it go faster, resulting in
a runaway reaction where any charged tachyon will promptly race off to
transcendence.
Although the above argument results in a curious conclusion, the meat of the
tachyon paradox is this: In relativity, the transcendence of a tachyon is
frame-dependent. That is, while a tachyon might appear to be transcendent in
one frame, it would appear to others to still have a nonzero energy. But in
this case we have a situation where in one frame it would have come to zero
energy and would stop emitting Cherenov radiation, but in another frame it
would still have energy left and should be emitting Cherenkov radiation on
its way to transcendence. Since they cannot both be true, by relativistic
arguments, tachyons cannot be charged.

This argument naturally does not make any account of quantum mechanical
treatments of tachyons, which complicate the situation a great deal.
Re:SETI will fail... by Hillman · 2002-10-31 11:31 · Score: 1

Seti listen to the frequency of hydrogen. Even if we don't use the same units, it's still the samething. If they live 1000 times faster, it's 1.42Mhz instead of 1.42Ghz for us. Anyway, you get the point
Re:SETI will fail... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 12:09 · Score: 0

uhmmm radio waves are a form of EMR, which travels at C. you can't get faster than radio waves u dope

folding at home by nounderscores · 2002-10-31 01:48 · Score: 1

If we don't get to try out alien cuisine in my lifetime because people hack seti@home I will be mildly annoyed.

If my lifetime is shortened so I never live try alien cuisine because somebody hacked folding@home MY ESTATE WILL LAUNCH A SERIOUS CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT!

Who is with me?

Re:folding at home by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 05:53 · Score: 0

Alien's taste just like chicken. So if you eat chicken as a cuisine you will know enough. Besides, who is to say that chickens aren't aliens?
Re:folding at home by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 06:06 · Score: 0

As the chickens would say:

All your alien are taste like us.

in an ironic way by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 01:52 · Score: 1, Funny

through this cheating the Seti@home project has proved that there is intelligent life in the universe... albeiet life with the ethics of the undead....

Re:in an ironic way by NanoGator · 2002-10-31 05:05 · Score: 4, Funny

"through this cheating the Seti@home project has proved that there is intelligent life in the universe... albeiet life with the ethics of the undead....

They definitely proved a deficiency of intelligence here on earth.

--
"Derp de derp."

Re:whyd they by rppp01 · 2002-10-31 01:56 · Score: 1, Offtopic

1. Cheat on SETI

2. ....

3. PROFIT!!

No seriously....I don't know why either. What a joke. Is having the best group worth hurting a perfectly good and (arguably) noble program such as SETI? I can understand games - but this? Let me guess they are the same people who bitch that think they need a quad xeon box for a single web site with less than 300 hits a day.

-sigh-

--
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself

top info from Univ of Amsterdam clusters by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 02:07 · Score: 0

Hmmm, two Univ. of Amsterdam 4-way Itanium clusters have been doing nothing but seti@home for a couple of weeks now.

thea:~> uname -a
Linux thea.sara.nl 2.4.18-xfs #2 SMP Wed Mar 20 10:45:45 CET 2002 ia64 unknown
thea:~> tp d 5

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND

552 jaap 18 1 17936 17M 1936 R N 99.9 0.2 12974m setiathome

560 jaap 18 1 16528 16M 1888 R N 99.9 0.1 13034m setiathome

574 jaap 18 1 16480 16M 1936 R N 99.9 0.1 12969m setiathome

/proc/cpuinfo shows 4 cpus, 733 MHz, Itanium IA-64.
free shows 8 GB ram each machine.

They (SETI@Home) could fix this easily by fudgefactor7 · 2002-10-31 02:21 · Score: 2, Interesting

Simply by refusing more than 4 WU a day per person. (6 hours for a 1Ghz PC to do one unit x 4 units = 24 hours.) Add to this if a single unit appears to have been submitted more than, say, 3 times, it will be "suspect" and resent out to be checked and you (the original submitter) will only get credit for it once it passes this second level.

Re:They (SETI@Home) could fix this easily by rc-flyer · 2002-10-31 02:30 · Score: 3, Insightful

Not a good answer. I personally have about 35 dual cpu systems which are processing Seti@home.

--
-- Error: Cannot find file REALITY.SYS - Universe halted, please reboot!
Re:They (SETI@Home) could fix this easily by fudgefactor7 · 2002-10-31 03:12 · Score: 2, Interesting

Ok, modify the above. Each SETI@Home install has a serial number, each computer has a different SN for it...then each computer can do no more than 4 WU a day. With that, you'd still be putting out the major numbers. (Nice going...!)
Re:They (SETI@Home) could fix this easily by dfeist · 2002-10-31 04:34 · Score: 2, Interesting

But my computers do 8... and they aren't the fastest you can get.
And additionally, this would do nothing to one of the points the article mentioned, where one unit is only processed once but submitted for different accounts.

--
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
Re:They (SETI@Home) could fix this easily by Darren+Winsper · 2002-10-31 04:57 · Score: 2

I've got an Athlon XP 1600+ (1.4GHz), and it can do better than 4 units a day. Hell, a 1600+ and a Celeron 366 are capable of putting in 8 units per day when completely unloaded.
Re:They (SETI@Home) could fix this easily by hankwang · 2002-10-31 05:20 · Score: 1

Wouldn't it be more robust if the server superimposes a verification signal on top of the working units? Something like a sinus wave with a certain frequency and amplitude. It is a small effort for the server to add such a signal, but the client has to do the full signal processing to find it back in the data.
Returned working units which do not contain the known verification signal can then easily be discarded as cheats.
Of course, this would not help against cheaters resubmitting the same data over and over again, but at least it would be sure that the returned data is not forged.

--
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Re:They (SETI@Home) could fix this easily by fudgefactor7 · 2002-10-31 06:59 · Score: 1

Hmmm, another good point. Perhaps each WU should be serial numbered and submission is only accepted once (prior to it being sent out for review.)

internal peer review already by peter303 · 2002-10-31 02:57 · Score: 2

The farmed out processing only seeks candidate signals. When one is found it is re-processed by the central site to verify and interpret it. This is sciencific re-produceability in action. I dont know the exact number, but there have been several dozen false-positives so far, e.g. overlooked satellites quasars and the such.

Re:internal peer review already by Megane · 2002-11-02 07:21 · Score: 2

Then what if seti@home randomly sent, say, 1 in 100 WUs that were false positives, with known results (not just computed by another client), to verify that ae clients wasn't simply hacked into returning all false-negative results?
As for the problem of someone getting a dozen clients to return the same work unit, this should be a simple case of "We never sent work unit x to this client, so why is it returning results for it?"

--
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }

MOD PARENT UP by jcoy42 · 2002-10-31 03:13 · Score: 0, Troll

Parent is underrated.

--
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.

Re:whyd they by Jugalator · 2002-10-31 03:26 · Score: 3, Informative

Not that I have anything against germans and their lives (heh), but the only seti@home work units on eBay seem to be from three germans??

--
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!

Cheating? by DaytonCIM · 2002-10-31 03:52 · Score: 2

How much of a loser are you to cheat at SETI?

Re:Cheating? by darketernal · 2002-10-31 04:25 · Score: 1

Same reason why people DoS servers just to fuel their jollies, cheat at CS (oh god), or spam IRC channels.

Just because.
Re:Cheating? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 08:03 · Score: 0

Your response answered the wrong question. "How much of a loser..." and "Just because." That made absolutely no sense.

Comment removed by account_deleted · 2002-10-31 04:08 · Score: 1

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Seti@Netherlands has some comments by jacoplane · 2002-10-31 04:09 · Score: 3, Informative

here, though they're in dutch. I would translate, but I have no time. Basically, they say that they don't want to win by cheating, and that if they have evidence to support the claim that someone is cheating, that person will be removed from the team.

Re:Seti@Netherlands has some comments by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 09:36 · Score: 0

This is true. Unfortunately, Seti does not allow team leaders to remove members from the team. ...This is one of the problems.
Re:Seti@Netherlands has some comments by yuri+benjamin · 2002-10-31 09:39 · Score: 1

My fav comment on the dutch site:
"Zware Sh#t is dit zeg"

(Zware = heavy, the next word is international :-)

--
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.

Re:Our experiences from running the rc5-56 challen by |<amikaze · 2002-10-31 04:14 · Score: 2

W32.HLLW.BYMER

This virus installed the distributed.net client on networks using open NetBIOS shares. It even had the owner's e-mail address in it..

SETI's a scam. Always was. So? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 04:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

SETI's a joke, a simple machine whose optimum output is funding.

They keep changing the rules: "If we do this, we'll find LIFE!" Then they don't find life. "Oh, wait, no, we'll do THIS -- and THEN we'll find LIFE!" Again, they don't find life. And so on, and so on.

The money fountain is based on the fact that you can't prove that there isn't life out there, somwhere. It's very hard to prove that something doesn't exist. Therefore, these witch doctors at SETI just keep on mixing new and different potions every year and charging the taxpayer an arm and a leg for it all.

What's worst is not the waste of money, but the violence done to the scientific method. Have you seen their calculations about the alleged "probability" of intelligent live existing somewhere else coincident with what passes for intelligent life on Earth? They've got these very serious-looking equations with variables and stuff, but the numbers they plug into the variables are all made up. They just pull numbers out of their asses! Who the hell knows how many Earth-like planets there are orbiting around G-type stars? NOBODY. We have exactly one (1) example to work from, and you can't generalize meaningfully from that. Who the hell knows how long the average radio-equipped civilization lasts before it blows itself up or transforms itself into energy beings and vanishes up its own etheric asshole? NOBODY. We have ONE example, which hasn't exploded or vanished yet, but who knows when or if it will? And what does that tell us about anything else? Nothing. If my dog gets hit by a car at age five, do I go and say, "Okay, that's how long dogs live: Five years. Now, given an arbitrarily assumed distribution of dogs on each of an arbitrarily assumed number of lawns in an arbitrarily assumed number of towns, we can calculate with meaningful precision that blah blah blah..."

No. Wrong. Dead wrong. You can't calculate squat from what we know about any of the stuff SETI is yapping about, because we know nothing about any of it. Making up an equation doesn't make it science. If you feed real data (we don't have any) into the equation and then compare the output to the real world phenomenon that it's supposed to model (about which we know nothing, in this case) and it matches up, then you know what you've got? You've got a hell of a lot more testing to do before you publish any conclusions, is what you've got, but at least you've got something meaningful. Nothing that SETI is doing is in any way falsifiable. The question they're asking isn't even clearly defined. It's not science. Period. It's an open-ended money pit.

Re:SETI's a scam. Always was. So? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 06:25 · Score: 0

Mod this to the top!
This is absolutely right!
Re:SETI's a scam. Always was. So? by Sparr0 · 2002-10-31 07:53 · Score: 1

If SETI (32m/yr) costs an arm and a leg, what the metaphor for the defense budget (wasnt it 400b last year?)?
Re:SETI's a scam. Always was. So? by Surt · 2002-10-31 08:07 · Score: 4, Informative

Ok, I know this is a troll but:

Care to venture how many tax dollars go to seti right now? I'll venture an impressive number: 0. Seti is not currently publically funded. That's right, its all voluntary donations.

I don't think anyone speaking for SETI has really made a claim such as: If we do X we will find life. Many times certainly they have said we _might_ find life.

The drake equation and its variables are not 'made up'. They are estimated as accurately as possible from star surveys of the galaxy. Only the last couple of variables are really open to any sort of scientific question, the others are pretty well settled. The question that should be asked is whether or not there are enough hospitable star systems out there that it might be possible for intelligent life to exist outside our solar system, and the answer is clearly yes.

Seti also has a clearly falsifiable premise: Seti claims that there might be other intelligent life inside of our galaxy (I believe that seti is willing to settle for our galaxy, since talking to anyone in a different galaxy is currently really beyond the realm of possibility for our technology). This claim is trivially falsifiable. Send a small probe to every start system, and survey any planets found. If no life is found, I believe that most if not all seti scientists will be glad to consider the question answered. Now sure, falsifying this way is a bit too difficult for us right now, so we're trying some other methods, but certainly within another century or so we should be well prepared to consider attempting a direct refutation of the seti premise.

Or you can view this from the other direction. Seti is a project engaged with the attempted refutation of the scientific premise that there is no intelligent life in our galaxy outside our solar system. In this case we might say that they are simply using the best tools available to them right now, and we can expect that within the next 10,000 years or so that the question will be pretty well settled by advances in our technology, but it might be settled much sooner than that, and the potential value of settling the question early is tremendous.

To clear up a last point, there are 2 questions I think seti would like to answer:

1) Is there life outside our solar system, inside our galaxy.

2) Is any of (1) that we discover, also intelligent.

I think both are clear and falsifiable.

--
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Re:SETI's a scam. Always was. So? by fataugie · 2002-10-31 08:36 · Score: 1

That's easy...

SETI is to an arm and a leg as
the defense budget is to your momma's ass

--

WTF? Over?
Re:SETI's a scam. Always was. So? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 09:20 · Score: 0

The drake equation and its variables are not 'made up'. They are estimated as accurately as possible from star surveys of the galaxy.

You're right: They are indeed estimated "as accurately as possible". The possible accuracy, however, is so close to zero as to inspire hilarity in any observer not utterly naive. How, exactly, do you use "star surveys of the galaxy" to estimate the number of Earth-like planets out there, given that we can't yet detect them? How about using that data to estimate the probability of life (intelligent or otherwise) arising on a such planet? How do you use that data to estimate the average lifespan of a civilization that produces radio waves? You can't. Forget it. We have absolutely no information on which to base an estimate. Not a speck.

We. Just. Don't. Have. That. Information. Yet. Maybe we'll have it in fifty years, or next June, or shortly after the Rapture, but we don't have it now.

So that's three crucial numbers in the Drake thing which are absolutely, beyond question, pure fantasy. "The answer is clearly yes", you say? Oh, please. Do tell. Explain to me how that comes to be "clear". Explain to me how you can provide a "clear yes" as an answer to a question when we have no relevant data whatsoever. You'd have a better chance of providing a definitive answer about what color my carpet is.

Mind if I ask why pure fantasy is being presented as if it were a meaningful component of scientific research? You don't even have to tell me. I already know: It impresses the marks (I've seen my share of dog-and-pony shows for startups with equally ludicrous business plans). Show 'em an equation with some good patter alongside it, and naive people will fall for it. They'll give you money to do your "science". Clearly, somebody is giving these crooks money. I'm glad to hear that it's not me (via the IRS and Congress), but somebody is definitely getting taken for one hell of a ride.

There's a word for this, and the word is not "science". The word is "wire fraud". Okay, that's two words, and I'll concede that SETI isn't promising anybody a quantifiable return on investment; that's the only reason they're not in prison. They are, however, lying to people and taking their money. I suspect that they know they're lying; it's hard to believe that any person even moderately well-informed could take Drake's pseudo-mathematical voodoo seriously.

But never mind all that; one of our sales engineers just stopped by my office and told me that we're all going to play UT 2003 as a "team building exercise". For the good of the company, we must! This guy could teach SETI some lessons about creative marketing.

I think I'll go build the team now. Ta!
Re:SETI's a scam. Always was. So? by Aronymous+Coward · 2002-10-31 11:11 · Score: 1

This kind of info makes me glad that I run, on my home and office Windows machines at least, the United Devices Cancer Research Project agent. In my case, that's all the idle cycles of about 17 machines (yes, that includes installations of the client on office desktops with managerial approval) dedicated to investigating possible drug candidates. That is, when the machines are powered on. :)

The targets seem achievable and intelligently chosen (at least to me, admittedly a layman), the goal is far more noble than - if not as sensational as - SETI@home, the results won't be sold to the pharmaceutical companies, and the client software is stable and stays out of your face.
Re:SETI's a scam. Always was. So? by (void*) · 2002-10-31 17:31 · Score: 2

Your anger, I believe, is misguided. You should learn a little bit about the philosophy of science. There is a difference between ontology and epistemology. You seem to be firmly convinced that we are not in a position to know anything about whether aliens are in the sky. I can see and agree with this. But regardless of our knowledge of this, there is a definite YES or NO answer to this question, once one is commmited to a clear definition of what life is and the scope of our search. Mankind might take a very long time to answer that question, a length of time, which I, conservatively guess to be longer than our lives.
This kind of long range endeavour should be given a kind of respect, given that we as humans invest so little of our energies to RATIONALLY answering long-term questions. Look around you - how much human effort is there expended into such thing? Why stamp them out, if you aren't even willing to stamp out clear fraudsters like BlackLight Energy?

Somebody do something! by zozzi · 2002-10-31 04:55 · Score: 1

The little green men! Won't no one care and take action to protect those poor little green men!

--
---

Official Word: not a problem for the science. by SETIGuy · 2002-10-31 05:08 · Score: 5, Informative

Yet another overblow cheating report. Frankly, it doesn't really impact the science. The cheaters only process a small fraction of the total data and candidate identification doesn't rely on either a single result or a results from a single work unit.

Lets keep the the scope of the problem in perspective. What these guys are worried about is being in first place in the stats. I understand their concerns, but right now we have neither the funds nor the manpower to share them. Perhaps when SETI@home is shut down, and SETI@home II is running, we will go back and adjust the totals. Perhaps not.

SETI@home II will run under BOINC and will have more immunity to such exploits. The cost of such immunity will likely be a GUID for each machine running BOINC, in addition to a per user key pair. This, of course, will get slammed by privacy advocates. Hell, if Microsoft were doing it I'd slam them.

Right now our priorities are

Keeping everything running.
Identifying candidates for reobservation at Arecibo (sometime in the next 4 months or so).
Building the SETI@home II data recorder.
Getting Astropulse running as part of the BOINC beta.
Finding enough funding to keep us running.
Designing the SETI@home II analysis code.

Sorry, but fixing the stats can't be a priority right now. The extension of that to "SETI@home doesn't care about cheating" is extrapolating too far.

--
Support SETI@home

Re:Official Word: not a problem for the science. by Not+Fragile · 2002-10-31 07:47 · Score: 1

Well,

For the many people that are in it for the teams, and for the stats - and that is a huge number, if this is an official line, you might just as well tell them that you do not care.

I hope that this is not an official respopnse, although sadly it rings true to the attitude that we have seen for many years.

As for the science aspect, if you get 100 people all returning the same result in the same WU, and 2 others returning a different result, which do you beleive ?

Because the 99% complete and pass it on, will give you just that.

This forces a re-process.

A detailed look at the top 100 producers (daily), shows that somewhere between 3 and 6 million results look suspicious.

Even if you take 3 million (the lower), thats 3 million which need re processing.

You then need to look at the percentage of the total work that a relatively small number of users are producing, and you realise that there is a lot of very small time processors, which are outweighed by this minority.

so you have to consider that the chances of re-sending to a group of suspects is high.

So you need to re-process 3 million WU.

Thats 3Million X 8hrs ? Thats 24 mllion hours of extra processing ? a Million PC days ????

Frankly you have to fix the stats, you have to fix the checks, and you need to calm down the users....

--
Not Fragile
Re:Official Word: not a problem for the science. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 08:07 · Score: 0

Yeah, calm down the users. Whatever.

Who cares if they aren't calm? They can stop whenever they want. They don't have to care about their stats. I don't think Seti@home's priorities should include "Try to satisfy people running our program that have messed up priorities and serious psychological problems".
Re:Official Word: not a problem for the science. by cmarc · 2002-10-31 08:12 · Score: 1

Have a look at this site : Open letter to Seti@Home

Users of many different teams are requesting some kind of action from you.

The statistics issue is but one aspect of the problem. These duplicate results are taking an increasingly large amount of resources away from legitimate participants. if the current trend continues they will soon represent a significant portion of daily results (we're probably to 10% already).

This is not a new problem members of several of the leading teams have emailed you without getting any response. This lack of attention to your user base is getting increasingly hard to understand and accept.

We understand you have limited resources but there is a large pool of enthusiasts who would gladly donate time as well as money to help you... If they have an opportunity to do so.
Marc

Seti's design is insecure by tuxlove · 2002-10-31 05:08 · Score: 1

If Seti@home is designed such that they will accept the same damn results from any number of users, it's lame. They should have built in a method of tagging each work request with a serial number and only accepting the results of a particular request from the user they originally gave it to - and only once. This is not only important for the competitive aspect of the project, assuring that competitors aren't cheating, but it also protects the integrity of the data crunching results that Seti@home exists for in the first place. I know Dave Anderson and he's smarter than this. I wonder why he didn't do something like this?

Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away by phorm · 2002-10-31 05:09 · Score: 1

Our alien friends are sighing in relief as SETI@home misses them due to skewed results. Or would this actually affect the work being done, other that to put overemphasis on certain results?

Re:MOD PARENT UP My parents left me on a stoop by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 05:13 · Score: 0

and I was raised by fireman. To this day the smell of a house burning reminds me of my dickhead parents.

Now I don't feel so bad... by TrentC · 2002-10-31 05:28 · Score: 2

...about not having run the client for the past few yeras. I used to have a copy of the SETI@Home client running on every machine I had legitimate access to, but after a few reinstalls of Windows here and there, I've never bothered to reiinstall it.

I did take part in the original RC-5 challenge, and put some work into the RC-64 (forgive me if the names aren't accurate, it's been a while) but I just could never get behind any of the new projects. The RC5 project had a definite timeline to it; it was kinda like playing the lottery -- sure, I didn't find the winning key, but I could have.

And now to have an open admission of cheating on the SETI project -- even if it's not to the degree the article suggests -- just leads me to believe that there are people who care more about the imaginary "score" than the goals of the project, so much so that they're willing to potentially corrupt the findings to "win".

And if the article is correct in saying that the project leaders at SETI don't care about the cheating, then I think it's especially tragic. I won't be donating any spare CPU cycles I have to this project, and I'll certainly be thinking twice about other similar projects.

I'm sure my computer will be just as happy drawing little hypecubes as crunching data on a cure for cancer or figuring out Saddam Hussein's email password (whoops, that's been done already)...

Jay (=

Wait until somebody investigates Slashdot scoring by sjonke · 2002-10-31 05:29 · Score: 1

Bribes, free prostitutes, free booze, free drugs, free cheezy poofs - you name it. When it comes to getting a +1 Informative and the recognition associated with it some go the extra mile.

Now, I've got to get to a party I'm throwing for Mr. Neal: Beer, naked chicks and a unicycle. Mod me up, please!

--
--- What?

Humour transplant by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 05:31 · Score: 0

No, you should get a humour transplant rather than just jumping to conclusions.

Re:Humour transplant by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 06:16 · Score: 0

No, you should commit suicide!

Aliens hiding by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 05:59 · Score: 0

Its really a group of aliens trying to taint the results so that they can keep hiding in high-earth orbit posing as a piece of old Apollo mission junk. How else can they keep playing practical jokes on back woods farmers. If you were an alien, would you want us to know you were there? It would spoil the fun.

The point of distribute computing by frankie_guasch · 2002-10-31 06:22 · Score: 1

That's an interesting issue. I do have my workstation working with folding@home and I'm careless of my stats.

But I know about people who stopped using it because their web site stats is ugly, sometimes it didn't work, and some problems about creating a group. That was long time ago, now it's better.

So you see, people may think it's more important ranking well in the stats that solving the protein folding issue and find the cure for alzheimer.

Human are very competitive, we want to be #1.

Need to learn how to right. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 06:29 · Score: 0

This guy (Andrew Colley) need to learn how to write.

"However its Berkeley-based administrators are, participants claim, ignoring allegations that cheating in the competition to contribute the most computing power to the project is rife."

Doesn't make very much sense, you can figure out what he mean but still.

Don't just sit there sign the petition to get it ! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 06:51 · Score: 0

Everyone go here and sign the petition to get it investigated once and for all.

Go here do it now !

http://www.teamprimerib.com/seti/

Why still run SETI? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 06:53 · Score: 0

I thought I just saw ALF on a 10-10-2-20 (long distance) phone commercial!?

Sign the petition ! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 06:55 · Score: 0

Go here and sign the petition to get it investigated !

http://www.teamprimerib.com/seti/

Do it now !

Seti@Home's error checking is flawed by Revar · 2002-10-31 06:55 · Score: 1

A while back, like a couple years ago, I started noticing that my home machine was cranking through work units at a rate that was a couple orders of magnitude faster than other similar machines. It took me a bit to figure it out, but apparently my IDE controller was intermittently failing, and corrupting my file system. So when SETI was writing out work units, it was either saving garbage or truncating the files. (I forget) Then it'd go through the motions of processing the file for 1% or 2% of the work unit, then abandon it as having too much noise. THEN IT REPORTED THE WORK UNIT AS PROCESSED. I sent the seti@home folks mail reporting the problem, and took my machine offline (and replaced it with a much nicer machine later), but I never heard back on my mail.

how it starts by Tablizer · 2002-10-31 06:56 · Score: 1

They started out Karma whoring, and progressively got more hardcore.

--
Table-ized A.I.

Take out the Game by _KhlER3L · 2002-10-31 07:03 · Score: 2, Interesting

If S@H didn't make it into a big race, people wouldn't be cheating. Give them a motivation, a simple numbers game, and they will, and have, to the detriment of the project.

Technical solutions such as adding hashes of this or encrypted that's will not tackle the root source of the problem: the game playing people themselves.

A solution I think might work would be to make WU statistics viewable only by the producer himself. Everybody wants to know what he or she has done, but compiling the data for an entire work group, much less all work groups, would be next to impossible. Without 'meaningful' ranking data, game players would have to find some other way to please themselves.

khl

Distorting the results... by jonadab · 2002-10-31 07:24 · Score: 2

The article says that the cheaters can have an impact on the results of the whole project. I read that, and I did a doubletake: What, the SETI project has results?

--
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.

check this out by scragg · 2002-10-31 07:38 · Score: 1

go to this URL. http://www.setiatwork.com/cgi-bin/unitedstates.cgi check #8 om4ti. This dude has been busting out with 10,000+ units a day. Two months at that rate and he will be top user...(i smell BS)

It's the Aliens! by hexx · 2002-10-31 07:40 · Score: 2

Maybe the aliens have decided they don't want to communicate with us after all, and so they're sabotaging the data...

And maybe we shouldn't be so judgemental and quick to criticize SETI@Netherlands - they're just pawns in an intergalactic game of cat and mouse.

This project was made sort of self correcting by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 07:49 · Score: 0

Like ya so some people are retards and don't care about the science behind it but if they are work unit spoofing some how it will not really change anything. This has to be varified results. So they get a hit say and because there spoofing the results that one hit gets set back 10,000 times say. Big deal. Don't matter same user or same group, I'll get tossed unless sombody else somewhere else on the planet processes the same WU and gets the same result.

The only thing that's being damaged is the stats.
Too me that sucks.
I was the guy that pointed it out when It got the world record. Guiness missed it.

I got it in the book

I also pointed this out:

September 26, 2001 --
We recently reached the ZettaFLOP (1021 floating-point operations) mark - a world record!

Now cause these stupid idiots are spoofing the data over the last few months it can't be trusted till it purged of the trash.

This is one of the cheats by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 08:03 · Score: 0

Cheating can be done by doing what you mention, intentionally and in various ways.

This is one of the cheats and it DOES impact the science, especially if used in conjunction with passing around WU. Then S@H receives not ONE bogus result, but many of them.

Alien contact by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 08:09 · Score: 0

In human history, the culture with the best technology or strongest military inevitably conquers and exploits the weaker. I think this is a result of evolution and natural selection, which should apply to other intelligent species, regardless of how radically different they may be. The chances are if we do find alien intelligence, they will be much more or less technologically advanced. In short, perhaps the SETI project is not such a good idea. Although it sounds like this latest cheating isn't based on such idealist political motivations

Obligatory Trainspotting Quote by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 08:16 · Score: 0

Dutch cunt(s).

Glad he cleared that up by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 08:28 · Score: 0

"He says the probability that all of SETI Netherland's statistics are legitimate is highly improbable."
I should have used that line in my statistics class...

same kinda loser that would.. by gl4ss · 2002-10-31 08:30 · Score: 2

**How much of a loser are you to cheat at SETI?**

same kinda loser that would.. reply to this saying
"the same kinda karmwhore who would reply to this saying 'the kind of a loser who would cheat in nethack and then brag about finishing it'".

--
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.

I try not go get too angry... by Eric+Damron · 2002-10-31 08:31 · Score: 1

I guess when dealing with the public one has to remember that no matter how noble the cause, there will always be a percentage of loser assholes that try to screw things up "just because."

I'm hoping that the people on the Seti project where insightful enough to plan for these jerks and are able to prevent the project from failing due to these morons.

Maybe Seti should stop publishing the number of work units done by each group or individual.

--
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!

Re:I try not go get too angry... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 09:46 · Score: 0

...If they didn't produce stats, it's VERY likely many people (Including myself) would leave. Sure, finding little green men would be nice, but, the chances of it happening are slim to none. Stats are there to encourage [friendly] competition between teams and individuals. Sure, there will be those who are so obsessed with the stats that they turn to cheating. Preventative measures must be taken to remove this possibility. Cheating has not become a problem in many other projects, including Distributed Folding and distributed.net, due to the measures taken to prevent such action.

Seti is a waste of time by Cro+Magnon · 2002-10-31 09:20 · Score: 2

I don't know why they're so keen on looking for intellegent life out there. They should be looking down here! OTOH, their odds of success are better out there.

--
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.

Not impossible, just harder than it was. by SETIGuy · 2002-10-31 09:35 · Score: 2

Cheating will always be possible. You can't have a trusted conversation with someone you can't trust. It's not like we can charge their credit card for every invalid result or have them arrested.

All you can do is make cheating hard. If you would like cheating to be very hard, feel free to go here and put in some work to help make it hard.

--
Support SETI@home

Flawed logic by bartok · 2002-10-31 09:45 · Score: 1

If enough cheaters submit faulty WUs, what's to say the those WUs were not supposed to return positive results? If all the people who double-check a result are cheater, then it's likely that if there is an alien signal to be detected out there, it may have gone unnoticed.

Message from my planet. . . by mntgomery · 2002-10-31 10:11 · Score: 1

this cheating must be stopped. Our race has had enough trouble hiding from the efforts of SETI@home, but so far its all been predictable. These cheats have made it very difficult to continue to conceal our existince from your planet. Please, put an end to it!

--

This comment was generated by a squadron of trained super elite albino ninja chickens for you.

Article overstates 'impossibility' by pellaeon · 2002-10-31 10:44 · Score: 1

Breaking 6 figures is not 'nearly impossible' for single users; I'm about to do so myself (90000+ now). But then, I'm a sysadmin with about 100 pc's doing seti at night, when it's quiet (nice 19, only when load is less than 1.2). I've been doing this since mid 1999. No cheating (former astronomy student here) but plain hard work (on the pc's part, that is).

You can't tell how many cpu's are behind any users' stats (though I agree 5000WU/day is suspicious to say the least). BTW, I'm also a member of seti@nl team and I have my suspicions about the top dogs too.

--
-- /bin/coffee missing. universe halted.

Who Cares? by aexandria · 2002-10-31 11:20 · Score: 0

As long as units get processe, the more chance the Barbarella will come down and sit on my face.

Don't think it can happen, huh? by dmforcier · 2002-10-31 11:22 · Score: 1

Check out Team Cheaing is Possible.

--
You can't take the sky from me!

Perhaps a bit off-topic... by apharov · 2002-10-31 12:28 · Score: 1

People are indeed unbeliavably greedy for getting maximum packets calculated in their name. I work at a medium-sized special PC-board manufacturing & design company, and the less technical (more managing) staff bought a Linux firewall machine "hardened" with mysterious proprietary software for about 3500$.

When we proceeded to put it in working condition we noticed (among quite a few other things) that the computer shop guy who had preinstalled Linux & IPchains & that mysterious software had also installed Seti@Home! The installation was of course under his name, and the program was scheduled to run via crontab... Way to go for a trusty firewall machine!

Needless to say, that machine wasn't deployed as planned.

The way to stop cheaters... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 14:24 · Score: 0

The only way to stop cheaters is closing the stats.

Speaking of Cheating by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 14:31 · Score: 0

The article about the cheating is being hosted at zd.com.au. When I went there, I got a pop-up offering a $10 gift certificate at amazon if I fill out a 15 minute survey. Being both stupid and greedy, I filled out the survey.

At the end, the survey "mentions" that only the first 50 submissions will get the gift certificate.

I've been cheated.

At least with seti@home I know ahead of time there are cheats.

simple solution to all their problems by Tuxinatorium · 2002-10-31 14:57 · Score: 1

IP ban everyone who gets impossibly high completion rates in excess of 1000GHz of athlon XP's (which is like the whole top 20 of that netherlands team and accounts for most of their WU's)

--
Repeal the DMCA!

SETI is a joke! Cheating at SETI is a riot! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 17:03 · Score: 0

Seriously, people HAVE been in contact with ETs for a while now. Don't give into the medias idea of "Evil ETs", there are many different personalities such as our own. Become enlightened, here are some credible links, the last two I have not read yet:

www.disclosureproject.org
www.cseti.org
www.to mkenyon.com (The Hathors: Messages from an Ascended Civilization)
www.billymeier.com (And Yet They Fly)
www.talkingtoets.com

Re:SETI is a joke! Cheating at SETI is a riot! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-31 17:05 · Score: 0

There is a reason for plausible deniability. Some of us are not ready for the truth.

Few more links:

http://www.eceti.org

My widdle bit (just sent to Berkeley U.) by Shalmaneser · 2002-10-31 20:09 · Score: 1

OPEN LETTER TO SETI@HOME

Subject: Result return cheating allegations.

Friday Nov 1, 2002

Scientists and administrators of the Seti@home project, I have two words for you: Element 118.

Why are you ignoring these extremely serious allegations? You have a duty as scientists to insure your work is legitimate and above board. Not only is your silence an insult to each and every one of the honest subscribers who make your project possible, but there is a distinct possibility that the cheating may be CORRUPTING YOUR DATA.

Perhaps you fear "rocking the boat" as you approach the inception of Seti@home II. Perhaps you dismiss the entire matter as irreverent, a "tempest in a teacup". Believe me, it is not! Address this matter NOW, before all your - and our - efforts are destroyed by sensational headlines in the mainstream media. Wake up! Ostriches end up drowning in sand.

There is a thread currently running over at Slashdot.org on this very subject. If you know anything at all about geeks (and make no mistake, it because of geeks that your project was viable in the first place and continues to this day) then cold dread should be running down your spines. Have you any idea at all how many of the geeks who run the major processing clusters and server farms which return the majority of your results read Slashdot? Or maybe you now know - ever hear of the "Slashdot Effect"

There are many other places people are expressing their outrage at what is going on. Google it -- I believe the blood will drain from your collective faces...

Or you could just check your own forums -- do you not even bother to moderate or look them over from time to time?

I have been a supporter since the very first month Seti@home went online. I am member of no team and care not a whit about competition. Period. I have supported you and given you my CPU time because I believe in the project and the promise of SETI as a whole. I never ended up becoming the scientist I so wanted to be as a boy -- life can be unfair that way :-( -- so this is a way that I can contribute, albeit in a small way, to the advancement of science and growth of our collective knowledge about the Universe. So I am sickened and disgusted, not only at the irresponsible small-minded idiots who are cheating, but at your refusal to acknowledge this very serious problem.

We await -- no, WE DEMAND -- your response forthwith, not to mention your assurance to us all, your supporters and the greater scientific community, that you are addressing and investigating this matter, thoroughly and honestly (as opposed to PR noises).

Re:Why Cheat? because .... by ParrotDroppings · 2002-11-01 00:21 · Score: 1

all your cpu-cycles and wu;s belong to us [G]

--
Free ?! Does that mean I can't get a Discount ?!
This message was /.'ed

'Failed' SETI is still a scientific success. by Martin+S. · 2002-11-01 01:10 · Score: 2

Also even if the SETI programme fails to find ET. It has proven very valuable in general scientific and social terms. advancing many fields from computing, electronics, physics, astrophysics, astronomy.

In out field alone, its justified as a development bed for the first large scale distributed computing project

The "philosophy of science" involves fakery? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-01 03:09 · Score: 0

You're avoiding the issue. The issue is twofold: Drake's Scam^H^H^H^HEquation is blatantly absurd, and SETI uses it for promotional purposes. Therefore: They know they're lying, and they keep on lying anyway because it gets them funding.

That is not science. That is a con game. There is a difference. Did you know the "cold fusion" scamsters conned France into giving them a research facility? Yep. They're fat as hogs over there, still producing irreproducible results and explaining away the obvious absurdities with legerdemain as transparent as Drake's Excuse. No doubt you think their "long range endeavour" should be given "a kind of respect", too. Honestly, I do give them both "a kind of respect": The same kind of respect I have for P. T. Barnum, but in lesser measure because Barnum had a sense of humor and he gave the marks a good time for their money.

Re:The "philosophy of science" involves fakery? by (void*) · 2002-11-13 07:15 · Score: 2

Cold fusion and SETI are not the same thing. There is a wide body of firm evidence against cold fusion. There is no firm body evidence against aliens. Well actually there is - data from the initial SETI efforts itself. Are you then of the opinion that the question is answered in the negative and we should forget it? Is this it? First you critique it for not being sucessful, then you critique it for not being science. Sorry, but you can't have your cake and eat it. It either was an honest but failed attempt to find something, or it was not a good attempt at all. What was it?

I say the methodology was clear and (GASP!) BENEFITTED astronomy. It was not wasted, but the science based on the Drake Equation is weak. Yes. Big deal - lots of science starts out that way.

SUCCESS !!! by Shalmaneser · 2002-11-01 11:25 · Score: 1

Text of letter posted earlier on the Seti@home forums. (Short version for the impatient: Success! They're listening. They're doing something about it. DON'T stop proccessing your WU's for Seti@home. But keep an eye on 'em, oui! ;-)

---------------- START ----------------

Ladies, Gentlemen, Others-Who-May-Be-Observing-Humanity ;-)

Seriously. Seems that all our ranting has indeed borne good fruit. If you reread my original furious "open letter" post, you'll note the part about forwarding a copy directly to the Top Dogs...

Well, it got through. And suspect it had companions banging at the Gates of the City, too -- if you keep your eye on the stats you might notice some "high-rollers" are suddenly finding their high numbers "zeroing out". Shucks! Bye-bye birdies, don't let the door hit you on the posteriors on the way out...

I've been in correspondence with Dr. David Anderson, Seti@home's Project Director, over this past day, and he's been kind enough to grant permission to quote from his emails to me in response to our concerns:

First off, a caveat in perspective:

"Dealing with SETI@home statistics and cheating is normally low on our list of priorities."

Wonder why? Could it be they have "actual science" distracting them from all the "Mine is bigger than yours" guerrilla warfare going on out there?

"But we realize ... that the recent surge of "mega-cheaters" could cause major problems both in terms of participant morale and possibly result integrity (though actually I don't think it's had an impact there so far)."

The "result integrity" was at the top of all our concern-lists (right, ye guerrillas? ;-), so they're keeping a close eye on that. And they're sensitive to the morale issue. Excellent! Now will all those posters over on Ars Technica and SlashDot and other free-fire zones out there saying they're quitting the field in disgust please come back? Pretty please? There are WU's waiting for you...

As for the cheaters:

"So we're going to start a process of detecting cheaters and zeroing their accounts. Some of this involves manual labor; We only have a few man/minutes per day to devote to this, but I think you'll see significant results immediately, and I hope this deters the cheaters."

There you have it. Success! They heard us. And they're doing something about it. Pat yourselves on the back, you all! Let there wine, and song, and dancing in the streets!

Oh, and people -- in case you've ever bemoaned your "amateur status" of being an uncompensated volunteer, it might cheer you up to learn Dr. Anderson doesn't get a dime for being Project Director. To wit:

"My work on SETI@home has been as a volunteer, sandwiched around various day jobs ... I don't even get a paycheck!"

He adds:

"Fortunately, this will change soon because we got an NSF grant to work on BOINC."

For the one person who's been hiding in the basement over the past months, BOINC is Seti@home's successor (and it is being coded from the ground up with anti-cheating features). As for the National Science Foundation, perhaps we should pool our energies and send the good folks at the NSF a note of appreciation and a bouquet of flowers to thank them for using our (well, yours actually -- I'm Canadian ;-) tax dollars to help the Seti@home project continue the good fight. (At least, some of the project team will be able to upgrade from Kraft Dinner Lunch Special and hiding the equipment in a broom closet down the hall...)

Seriously, a short and polite note (and *don't* you dare mention *anything* about "cheating problems" !!!) to the NSF thanking them couldn't hurt. They may be bureaucrats, but they're also human beings, and it's nice to feel the (tax-paying) public appreciates the projects you fund. Remember that it's BOINC, and not the current Seti@home, that they're helping to support.

~Thomas N. Cooley, NSF Chief Financial Officer and Director: tcooley@nsf.gov

~Donald G. McCrory, Deputy Chief Financial Officer and Director: dmccrory@nsf.gov

Now let's allow the good Doctor and his long-suffering colleagues get back to work, shall we? Or, as he wryly states:

"We're all generally overworked and swamped with emails, and we do a balancing act between writing grant proposals, writing papers, dealing with database and server issues, maintaining our web site, doing some actual scientific or programming work, and so on."

I shudder to think what their email Inboxes must look like by now . Kudos to all who took the time to address this issue and don't give up on the project! Keep those WU's rolling and pass on your valuable and well-appreciated efforts to BOINC once it gets going!

Dr. Anderson has already posted a message to this forum earlier today and has certainly privately enmailed other concerned parties on the side. Please pass on the news to all who are still ranting and raving. Tell them to come back @home, SETI stil loves them... ;-)

Peace on you all.

---- END (and sorry for the massive wordage -----

Easiest Solution by Snover · 2002-11-01 22:37 · Score: 1

Anonymise it. Make statistics private/non-existant. If people feel like cheating they can take a screenshot of SETI@home and Photoshop it.

--

[insert witty comment here]

Well they fix it. There deleting accounts ! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-03 19:24 · Score: 0

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/bb/bb2/bboard.c gi?action=viewthread&num=15459

Last Post! by alpg · 2002-11-14 06:09 · Score: 1

Linus Torvalds:
> This is the special easter release of linux, more mundanely called 1.3.84
Winfried Truemper:
> Umh, oh. What do you mean by "special easter release"?. Will it quit
> working today and rise on easter?

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...

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