Megor writes "Well it was bound to happen, people are cheating on Seti@home to inflate their work unit statistics, and the people who administer Seti are ignoring the complaints. ZDNET has an article explaining how they are cheating."
Interesting paper on this subject
by
taviso
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Theres an interesting paper on this subject available here. well worth a read.
-- ex$$
Motivation?
by
Enocasiones
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· 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.
-- Enoc
Re:Motivation?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· 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.
Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ?
by
holle2
·
· 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
anshil
·
· 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.
SETI Checking?
by
rabiteman
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· 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
phragle
·
· 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
·
· 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
Coplan
·
· 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.
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.
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
I might feel like a loser at times, but...
by
ClassicG
·
· 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...
Our experiences from running the rc5-56 challenge
by
jukal
·
· 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
·
· 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.
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)
what about peer review?
by
caveat
·
· 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
One possible response...
by
Alsee
·
· 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.
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.
Wasn't seti@home just about scoring high work units?
And what is this extraterrestial stuff people are going on about?
It's too competitive.
by
pommaq
·
· 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.
Simple solution
by
wowbagger
·
· 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.
Re:SETI will fail...
by
Contact
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· 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...
Official Word: not a problem for the science.
by
SETIGuy
·
· 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.
Slashdot Mirror
Theres an interesting paper on this subject available here. well worth a read.
ex$$
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.
Enoc
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
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
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!
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...
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.
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.
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)
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. /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.
if this is
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
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.
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?
Wasn't seti@home just about scoring high work units?
And what is this extraterrestial stuff people are going on about?
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.
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
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...
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