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Is SETI a Security Risk?
Dotnaught writes "Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, fears the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) may be putting the earth at risk. As reported in the Guardian, Carrigan frets that alien radio signals could pose a security risk. The report cites a 2003 paper entitled "Do potential Seti signals need to be decontaminated?" but Carrigan's website has more details. Basically, he's calling for isolation of SETI computers and additional security measures. He writes, "To paraphrase Cocconi and Morrison for the possibility of a malevolent SETI signal ...the probability of a contaminated SETI signal is difficult to estimate; but if we never consider it the chance of infection is not zero."" Frankly, I'm more worried about some phishing malcontent then I am about the Grays, but maybe that's just me.
- Raw signal in memory must bootstrap to status of operating program
- Program must then untangle the inner workings of the host. (Is it possible to now build a diagnosis program to determine the operating set of an unfamiliar computer?)
I'm not a software engineer but... no, wait, I AM a software engineer, so I'm curious, how does this 'virus' execute step 1 [Buffer Overrun & Privilage Escalation] without doing step 2 first [Determine instruction set for system] (Which incidentally requires step one to have been performed first.)As far as I see it, theres as much chance of data in the recieve buffer created by background radiation being a viable 'virus' as there is a deliberate chunk of data will be
This sounds suspiciously like
1) Send malicious code
2)
3) Infect universe (and profit)
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Aliens surmise that radio signals can be intercepted and decoded by individuals light years away and then go to the trouble of sending a signal encoded with a virus of some sort? Someone needs to get out more often, methinks.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
First I thought SETI is risk to earth itself. What if aliens are listning us and preparing for something big!
...completely out of his mind?
;-)
Granted - once we had contact any alien civilisation could also get into a situation where they could potentially send malware to Earth.
But - isn't Seti right now looking at data from stars a good number of lightyears away? How likely is it that aliens on the off chance of infecting a computer would send out virusses and/or worms that would run on current CPUs and chipsets, using security holes that are current NOW? (Remember - if aliens 10 lightyears away would get hold of enough Earth signals to decode Intel assembly language and to understand Windows security holes, even if they could decipher all that overnight and write a terminal computer virus in another hour - it still took them 10 years to receive the signals from us and it would take another 10 years for them to come back). How likely is it that a virus working on 20 year old hard-/software (including OS and everything) would still work on a large portion of critical infrastructure today?
Given that Seti only checks data, but doesn't try to execute it, shields us even further from the whole thing...
Or - is Mr. Carrigan now assuming that there is an imminent threat of an attack by Bin Laden against the Internet - through Seti@home ?
Now that would make even Bush sound perfectly sane...
Did this guy just watch "Independence Day" or something?
I've seen this movie, but it's the other way around. We're the ones that upload the virus to the aliens, not them to us... don't be silly.
Theres at least one viewer of threshold right there.
Because, of course, the aliens use binary Von Neumann machines with register/accumulator architectures, and instruction sets we're familiar with.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
If Will Smith can do it, it must be true.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
Alien's don't exist!
This brings up so interesting thoughts/concerns but I would have to say the risk of a virus is so close to 0 that I am going to say there is a ZERO chance of this happening. An alien race receives our signals that are 50 years out of date then have to predict 50 years in the future to send the signal back. Having 100-year technology/prediction gap, then they are so advance that they wouldn't infect our computer, they would just stomp us if they wanted to. Of course this may not be all doom and gloom; imagine if the aliens had a sense of humor. What if the virus made all the cd trays dance to the beat of Mambo #5.
... to know how to program for our computers without ever actually haven seen one.
As official Earth contactee for the benevolent Betelgeuse civilization, I have been told to warn you that the evil Andromedans are using the SETI program to keep a fresh list of potential abductees for nefarious experiments.
They also recently developped antitinfoil penetration technology, so those of you who are using this means of protection are now vulnerable.
These beings will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of your colon!
Consider yourselves warned.
I'll read the content of the article after I construct a tin foil hat for my laptop.
OMG It's Threshold http://www.cbs.com/primetime/threshold/
Aliens have already infected Earth with a virus: it's called mankind.
Has anyone been 'round to the local galactic administrative office lately? Anyone?
They could travel into the computer themselves and take it over if they wanted.
Someone save me from this sanity.
... of someone who's very knowledgeable in one technical field (in this case, particle physics) assuming that this knowledge carries over into another, almost unrelated technical field (in this case, computer science.) I'm sure that Dr. Carrigan is a very, very smart guy, but odds are he uses his computer as a tool without a whole lot more understanding of its inner workings than that possessed by the typical business user.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Does this give new meaning to the phrase: HACK THE PLANET ???
Frankly, I'm more worried about some cd containing a friggin' rootkit....
This is about as likely as that guy hacking the mothership main computer in the movie "Independence Day".
Gee isn't it lucky that a totally alien civilisation also happened to independently invent a Von-Neumann architecture running an 80x86 instruction set also with buffer-overflow vulnerabilities.
I wonder if they run Windows XP?
Hmmm ... Someone is fearing that dangerous, evil, Bin Laden-linked terrorists are out there in space and can use SETI@Home to attack planet earth. Well, I'll shut down my mobile, my wi-fi antenna, my AM radio and I will also stop hearing at what other "poeple" say ... just in case E.T. is using sound waves to invade my brain.
Lest we forget, being an authority in one field (nuclear physics in this case) does not automatically make you an authority in other fields (like computer science). Carrigan's concerns should be taken with a large grain of salt.
I'm sure this guy can't be serious. Its probably just a funny joke started over coffee on a slack day at Fermilab, and they thought it was so hilarious they couldn't wait until April 1 to release it. Can anyone at Fermilab hear giggling?
Its equivalent to rooting a system by holding a particular pattern in front of a web cam, causing a buffer overflow in the Jpeg compression....
Baz
That'll help prevent interstellar buffer overruns 'sploits!
Either that or we'll send them Theo de Raadt.
The "malicious signal" may be of earth origin, just send it to the antennas on the right frequency and make it similar enough in shape to the space noise and it will get processed just the same. Or hijack a DNS and post new "work units" with malicious content acting as SETI.
Thing is you don't need to separate the data, you just need to make the processing software secure, in such a way that data is analysed and never executed, there's no chance of buffer overflow or other potential risks coming from the data. Simple as that.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
"the probability of a contaminated SETI signal is difficult to estimate; but if we never consider it the chance of infection is not zero"
No shit Sherlock. So, in your mind, that's sufficient to call for security controls? The fact that something can happen on a non-zero probability? Worst, the threat scenario you imagined is a *computer virus*? Tell me, did you rent Independence Day during the Thanksgiving weekend? That's the worse excuse for paranoia I've ever seen, and I'm reading slashdot daily. There are millions of potential security threats out there with a non-zero chance of happening, and thanks God we ignore the vast majority of them.
Most of the machines running seti are windows and linux machines, which are safe - everyone knows only Apple laptops are AlienOS Compatible. So what if the apple users start acting weirdly - it's not like anyone is going to notice the difference.
..to our ICBM-installations. This would provide extra security in case an Alien tries to infect our computers with a virus: we just nuke them !
On second thought... maybe that Carrigan is in fact an alien posing as human that is against aliens infecting human PC's through the alien ether, and maybe he is, like all aliens, after only one thing: World Domination (tm)!
Oh no, what have we done!
Dear Richard Carrigan,
You keep doing particle Physics, and we'll keep doing Computer Science.
Love,
The Computer Scientists
A slightly different concern I have heard expressed in relation to efforts to contact ET relate to the possibility that some unfriendly species will see our signal, take a look at our planet, and decide to enslave us. I know that respected professors at the University of Reading's Cybernetics department, whose names escape me, have expressed such concerns.
Since SETI and other similar programmes are based on the not unreasonable belief that other technologically advanced civilizations exist on distant planets, is it sensible to contact them and alert them to the presence of our resource rich planet? Extremely remote risk, but is there any reason to think that aliens are friendly? If earth discovered life on another planet, and this planet also happened to possess some material which greatly enriched the lives of humans on earth, how would we react?
IANASFB (I am not a science fiction buff) but I presume this type of scenario has been discussed.
the alien civilisation has developed the technology, ... hey mister maxwell why don'tse my magneztses glow?
to piggy back-modulate magnetic waves into electromagnetic
ones
I chose to opt-out and receive no annoying spam email from any extra-terrestrial sources. I just gave them my name, SSN, all email addresses, and home phone and cell phone numbers to not call. Then I opted out of any credit card theft stuff by giving them all my Visa, MC, and Amex numbers to identify accounts not to use. I provided Mom's maiden name for verification. I wear my tin-foil hat during solar flare storms.
And I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night
Busy aligning my non-linear thoughts.
Where do you think Windows came from?
[ducks]
So sure, there's a risk like there is with any system. But far more likely, the risk would be from people writing malicious code and sending it down to the open dish from a plane or mountain or whatever.
But then again, that's no bigger risk than the system would experience just by being hooked up to the internet.
It was jeff goldblum, you insensitive clod!
How do you know you are not being used to crack someone's encrypted files?
It's pretty sad that they're actually wasting brain cycles thinking about threats like this. No, the risk of infection isn't zero. But it's damn close to zero. It isn't zero if you 'secure' SETI systems, either. It isn't even zero if you dismantle the SETI telescopes.
But money spent on this is money better spent elsewhere, practically no matter where else you spend it. This should have been in the 'It's Funny, Laugh' topic.
(Prediction: this will appear on Schneier's blog by end of day tomorrow)
This what happens when smart people read books like Dan Brown's Digital Fortress.
If the government is concerned about alien signals hacking our precious communications infrastructure... then could they please just release all information they have concerning extra terrestrials. Man, how can the government convince the public that isolating SETI from alien influences is necessary, if they don't come out and admit / prove that aliens exist. We know they're out there, but our society as a whole doesn't. Honestly.. we are all fundamentally stupid creatures.
If i wanted to hear bullshit, i'd go to church.
After all, that's how we beat the aliens back on Independence Day a few years back, right?
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
...it's that Alien computers are susceptible to MACINTOSH viruses! (See "Independence Day", for example.) For once, Windows uses are immune to an attack!
Best Buy can have you arrested
The real reason behind research requests for adding processes (and red tape) is budgetary. This guy wants to see more money spent!
Don't be surprised by it. Government has terrorists to help increase their budget (war is the health of the State). Scientists have the bird flu, HIV and little green men.
Has /. become a focal point for all the worlds nut jobs today or something? What with this and the guy asking to move porn onto another port all we need now is one of the monty python crew to do us a silly walk. How do these people get to take control of my pixels?
What's most scary though is that there is a small percentage of people who will believe him. I think those people scare me more now I come to think about it. At least this guy is just trying for his 15 minutes of fame.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I fear the alien death ray!
[%] Cingular Ringtones
SETI data is pretty much indistinguishable from random numbers. In fact, the extremely rare patterned sequences of data are the holy grail of the pursuit.
.... most likely lots of virus code has already been processed because random noise will eventually produce every virus, just like monkeys and keyboards will produce Shakespeare. One could, I guess, hold the position that by processing random data we are putting ourselves at risk and that rings more true than some civilization producing intentional sequences with malicious intent.
So
Even if the risk is so small as to be vanishing, the problem with this sort of rubbish (similarly to a lot of IT security consultant twaddle), is there's still a risk. Put another way, is there no risk at all that something from SETI could cause a problem on a PC...? Answer is, yes, there's a very small risk, but it is still a risk. For the PHB types (or journalists) who don't understand how to quantify risk, this can be something to panic about. I bet that more than one IT support person has been asked by his/her Guardian reading boss how SETI can be banned from the site because of this "issue". Anthony.
Wormy, you always were a dumbass, but this takes the cake. You could have at least posted as an AC for this, but we would have found out anyway. We just can't tolerate this kind of breach of security protocol.
Consider yourself fired. You know very well what this entails - you have a week to put your affairs in order and say your goodbyes. Dumbass.
Okay, in order for infectious code to even contaminate our systems we're begging the question that aliens know the language our systems are communicating in. The odds that aliens are within earshot is one thing to overcome. Add to that: the odds that they're intelligent, odds that they have technology to code with, odds that they have been watching us long enough to reverse engineer our code in order to contaminate our systems, the odds that our systems would interpret this code. But hey, it got him some press, which is probably what a lot of this is about.
And he is after all, one of the most reputable names in the computing field today.
Computer scientists argue that to hack a computer, or write a virus that will infect it, requires a knowledge of how the computer and the software it is running work: a computer on Earth is going to be as alien to the aliens as they would be to us. But Dr Carrigan says there is still a risk.There most certainly is a risk: a risk that someone in the government might actually take a particle physicist's word that aliens are trying to hack the Internet (which, given the speed of light, most enlightened civilizations in the galaxy won't find out about for about 200 years, assuming they are listening in the first place).
On the one hand, I don't know why this is a story. This guy is out of his element, and no one should be taking him too seriously (Independence Day buffs notwithstanding). On the other hand, the chance that people in positions of power with less than two neurons to rub together might take this guy seriously, thereby jeopardizing peaceful scientific research (see Contact) has me just a bit concerned.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
is sending signals out. Although we may think we are saying hello, the receiver may be thinking, "Hmmm, I do need more meat in my diet."
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
...to take over with such a signal.
While I believe such a scenario is entirely possible, I think that our Pentium 4's and Sparc's are just not capable of enabling such a feat. The code to do so would either take several megabytes or be so strongly compressed that our machines simply would no be able to unpack it in under a decade.
It would sort of be like the NSA travelling back in time and trying to remotely root the Union Pacific's telegraph machines.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Did someone watch Independence Day over Thanksgiving weekend? Physics guys are smart and stuff so I could see him reversing the situation and .......
:)
Come to think of it how many alien movies end up with positive outcomes for the aliens? We broadcast this stuff all day, every day with repeats ad nauseum. Damn, now I'm worried too
What we should be worried about is the interstellar equivalent of flashing road sign saying,
"Eat at Earth".
And even if they do not want to eat us, who says we won't want to eat them. If Broccoli based aliens land on Earth, I will become a mass serial killer running around with a jar of cheese whiz!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
There really is no need for remote infiltration of the OS, since high school students have been doing it for years. Why would first (acknowledged) contact be to give a virus to Windows users? It is like pouring salt in the ocean.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
that seems to be as likely as if someone who does not speak your language could give you a speech that changes your beliefs
furthermore, if some cilivlisations are really capapble of such a feat, for each successfull virus there should be millions of tries that fail partially because of some odd incompatibility.
So, where are all the signals from outer space that *almost* managed to take over seti? Some should at least have crashed it.
Since mankind came about through "Intelligent Design", so will the aliens. And hence it's natural that their Intelligent Design also led them to having Windows (completely independently developed - but still the same thing - it's in our eternally unchangeable intelligently designed genes, remember?)
*smile*
Somehow I wouldn't be quite so surprised if it really turned out the guy would be a creationist...
Sounds like such bad Sci-Fi that he could become a writer for Threshold.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I belive he's talking about those pesky abstractions we all use without a thought everyday. Basically, the scenario unfolds in this way: you recieve information from a entity and the ideas contained within said information can be helpful (like Universal Cure) to harmful or disruptive (something along the lines of a memetic virus).
It would be a nasty trick for an alien civilization to give us the most destructive weapon possible without giving us accompaning social skill's as well. Or we could figuratively be on the 'beads' end in some initial contact scenario.
To quote Morris Berman, "An idea is something you have, an ideology is something that has you.". An old alien civilization out there could just be very good at constructing ideologies. I'm not saying now is the time to consider this chance, rather that it should be considered when alien contact occurs.
Shh.
This will prove that everybody in the known universe KNOWS that windows is trivial to infect.
...But maybe that's just me.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
A supervirus from outerspace.... Wow this guy probably saw this http://www.virusthemovie.com/ movie...
Did anyone else immediately think of Snow Crash when they read this? I'm guessing Neal Stephenson did a lot of acid when he wrote that novel. I'm guessing that this guy did a lot more acid than Neal if he believes there is any truth to it.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
This is basically the risk of the Blight from Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon The Deep". The idea is that even if you can't imagine how such a virus could be written, alien AIs sophisticated beyond our imagination might be able to.
Xenu loves you!
And he's watched too many epic science fiction films with bad science and dopey fiction. Nothing to see here. Move along.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Aliens could send a message to earth in cleartext, and half the idiots on this planet would look up and say "Yes Sir!".
What is more dangerous is that the signals from space are perfectly random. This includes the possibility that the signal could contain the perfect virus. As a random event and not a hostile act.
This guy is trying to obtain a number of SETI dedicated computers assigned to its own project.
We now know from our own history that the time in which a civilization broadcasts analog radio signals at high power is a very narrow window.
The power of individual radio signals has declined precipitously in the last 50 years, as more and more stakeholders have made use of the radio spectrum--the power and band spread of individual signals has decreased. This trend will only increase as the sophistication of encoding, filters, frequency hopping, and spread-spectrum useage increases. Also, as the speed and encryption sophistication of digital signals increase, the transmissions begin to sound more and more like noise to an analog receiver.
In addition, for long-range data transmission the preferred technology is now wired, not wireless. The only exception is the satellite bounce, which is used very infrequently and does not require a very high-power signal.
These trends are not capricious but result directly from the physical limitations of radio transmission. Therefore it seems likely to me that such trends would develop in any civilization that transmits information electronically. As a result, not only would we need to physically point our telescopes at the correct region of the sky to find another civilization, we would also have to be lucky enough to catch them in the "high power analog (or simple digital) broadcast" phase of their civilization. Based on our civilization so far, that window might only be a century or two wide.
The only exceptions to this that I can think of are transmissions to space probes such as Voyageur. These are of necessity higher power and simpler than other radio spectrum use (since they are locked into their technology level at launch). But these are also directional and infrequent.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I send you greetings from what you know as the smaller magelenic cloud. my name is ortion fleglar, and my father, the late ortion flekgar, left to me a sum of one hundred million kletlons before being pulled into a hyperspace anomoly. Before his untimely demise, he warned me never to trust my hive-mothers, gleblon flamkis and formta gleklar...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I never saw anything in there permitting interstellar export. Something is going to have a lot to answer for....
I know you think Brannon Braga is a genius, but he isn't. Carla Gugino IS exceptionally beautiful, true, but she's not a scientist. Threshold the TV show is just that: a TV show.
Nobody's trying to send us computer viruses from Jupiter. Any alien race capable of doing that would probably have a much better way of killing us off. Keep your fearmongering to yourself.
"A for Andromeda" (Fred Hoyle - TV series and book) and
(sort of) "Macroscope" (Piers Anthony - book) have this as
plot devices.
Sounds to me like mr. Carrigan just finished reading Macroscope.
...tempting offers to enlarge their gnorgls, pictures of young teens foithboindering, and sincere offers from Dr. Blfpsplk who wants to smuggle thirty million credits out of the country and will happily give 10% of it to any reliable person who will lend him the use of their bank account... ...I'll start worrying.
Because then they will get OUR viruses, and reverse-engineer them.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You know we are just going to get annoying pop-ups with little blue naked women on our screen saying "Buy cyalis now or suffer our death rays!"
Come on this guy's a wacko. First they need to decode our language, then they can start decoding our software. Good grief! It's like the notion aliens out there are going to have a face, eyes, hands, legs and wow look remarkably humanoid.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
http://setiathome2.ssl.berkeley.edu/fcgi-bin/fcgi? cmd=view_feedback&id=27264
All I care about is driving down my avg. processing time per unit @ this point, from:
3 hr. 12 min. 13 sec.
(and, counting, going downwards @ roughly 1.7-2.0 seconds per unit processed @ this point & we only have until Dec. 15th 2005, then this section (the original) of this project shuts down & the app quits getting datasets to process - my first 50 were done on an AMD K6-III @450mhz (avg. 24 hr. per unit processing time here), then the next 310 were done on a Dual CPU/SMP Pentium III @ 1ghz (avg. 6 hr. 58 min per unit processing times here on this 2nd rig) & now I can get down to 2.5 hours per unit processing time now on this setup listed below)
Pentium 4 3.2ghz
512mb Micron matched pair DDR400 RAM
Western Digital "raptor" 36gb disk #2 (storage)
Western Digital "raptor" 74gb disk #1 (apps + OS)
CENATEK "rocketdrive" 2gb (solid-state disk where I run the units from)
GeForce 6800 GT OC by BFG vidcard (not that it matters, but listed it anyhow)
Right now, I'm the fastest per-unit processing time on my team, TRIBAR (which is #51 & right behind TeamSlashdot on the top 200 chart), & want to get under the 3 hr. mark & into the 2 hrs.++ range... doubt I have the time to get there, but will try until Dec. 15th 2005 when this project shuts down & moves to the BOINC client as part #2 of this study/investigation.
Now, on topic:
Do I think this dataset can be used to hijack a system? No, I doubt it, but then, I do not have the sourcecode to the SETI@Home charactermode/consolemode app that I use either... still, I find it VERY doubtful it could be used maliciously in & of itself.
(Could the client-app have buffer overflow possibilities? Sure, local or remote wouldn't matter because once you run it, since it's a client app, any LOCAL exploits become remoteable if the app is attacked, & runs its bogus code (if any) under YOUR user-rights context!)
APK
P.S.=> I think the project will have merit in the future, helping us choose which galaxies etc. to choose as candidates for exploration... as well as being an EXCELLENT benchmark of computer system CPU/RAM performance! apk
I don't think there's anything else out there. I'd rather spend funds on US getting OUT THERE than trying to get a non-existant THEM to come OVER HERE. Or we could cure cancer or something. That works, too.
Why does having the two letters Dr in front of your name give make all these sycophantic reporters sit up and beg for scraps of wisdom from their over excercised jaw?
This is just so ludicrous - It basically boils down to someone who quite possibly is very knowledgable in their field has picked up a smattering of knowledge of computer science, decided their genious knows no bounds of disciplines, added 1 and 1 together and got 147.
It is quite possible that their are security vunrabilities in seti, but it is also certain they are hard to find (otherwise, we would have exploits going around)
It is possible that a certain data set could cause the program to overflow and allow arbitary excecution. The overflow could happen with a random set of data, but to do something useful (or damaging, depending on which point of view) you need to have a good knowledge of the program, the machine it running on etc etc.).
It is highly unlikely that alians would have that kind of knowledge of the machines. They may get a smattering from TV/radio broadcasts, but about the only place I can think that they could get the level of information required (without any physical access to earth resources) would be the internet. If they have net access, then they do not need to use seti as entry point, any vunrability would do. dito for if they have physical access.
Also, what is the worst their virus could do? Require a reinstall on a few home PCS. Bring the internet to its knees for a few days? You have to remember, the internet is under attack every second of everyday, and more or less copes ok. Our greatest evil geniuses who have intimate knowledge of the systems are not able to do more than cause slight annoyances (yes, I know companies and governements like to come out with losses of billions, but really!).
In conclusion, this dude is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
That's why the Battlestar Galactica uses all those out-dated systems.
rewriting history since 2109
why all the virus activity we're seeing on the SETI networks is written for Windows 1.0.
SELinux policy for seti (homemade):
/var and /var/run
# setiathome
daemon_domain(setiathome)
general_domain_access(setiathome_t)
# type setiathome_t, domain, privowner;
# allow root to start it:
role system_r types setiathome_t;
role sysadm_r types setiathome_t;
# type setiathome_exec_t, file_type, sysadmfile, exec_type;
type setiathome_datafile_t, file_type;
domain_auto_trans(sysadm_t, setiathome_exec_t, setiathome_t)
domain_auto_trans(initrc_t, setiathome_exec_t, setiathome_t)
allow setiathome_t setiathome_datafile_t:file { getattr read write append };
allow setiathome_t self:process execmem;
allow setiathome_t user_home_t:dir search;
# file_type_auto_trans(creator_domain, parent_directory_type, file_type, object_class)
file_type_auto_trans(setiathome_t, user_home_t, setiathome_datafile_t, file)
# etc
allow setiathome_t etc_t:dir search;
allow setiathome_t etc_t:file { getattr read };
allow setiathome_t etc_t:lnk_file read;
allow setiathome_t root_t:dir search;
# network
allow setiathome_t dns_port_t:udp_socket { recv_msg send_msg };
allow setiathome_t http_port_t:tcp_socket { recv_msg send_msg };
allow setiathome_t netif_eth1_t:netif { tcp_recv tcp_send };
allow setiathome_t netif_lo_t:netif { udp_recv udp_send };
allow setiathome_t node_t:node { tcp_recv tcp_send udp_recv udp_send };
allow setiathome_t self:tcp_socket { connect create read write };
allow setiathome_t self:udp_socket { connect create getattr read write };
allow setiathome_t net_conf_t:file { getattr read };
# locale
allow setiathome_t locale_t:dir search;
allow setiathome_t locale_t:file { getattr read };
# libs:
allow setiathome_t ld_so_cache_t:file { execute getattr read };
allow setiathome_t lib_t:dir search;
allow setiathome_t lib_t:lnk_file read;
allow setiathome_t shlib_t:file { execmod execute getattr read };
allow setiathome_t usr_t:dir search;
# search
allow setiathome_t var_run_t:dir search;
allow setiathome_t var_t:dir search;
# dev/pts
allow setiathome_t device_t:dir search;
dontaudit setiathome_t sysadm_devpts_t:chr_file { read write };
dontaudit setiathome_t staff_devpts_t:chr_file { read write };
allow sysadm_t self:process execmem;
allow setiathome_t ld_so_t:file execmod;
allow setiathome_t self:capability dac_override;
TODO: 753) write sig.
Can I be the first to please request the revocation of Mr. Carrigan's "junior physicist" badge and secret decoder ring?
I for one hope this is all just a left-over April fools joke or something. It's far too scary to me to believe that someone who would actually publish such nonsense -- and mean it -- could manage to get hired by Fermilab.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
I think we should be more concerned about them sending us porn. Could you imagine the devistating effect alien porn could have on the human race?!?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Frankly, anyone who is 2-3 years ahead of today could lay waste to our entire IT infrastructure anyway. Just look at what some malware can do that's a month or so ahead of current patchlevels.
:)
Any aliens that are 10, 100 or 1000 years ahead of us technologically... well, the 10-year-ahead aliens probably know how to wipe out every computer on earth within 2 minutes. The 100 and 1000 years-ahead aliens almost certainly aren't backwards compatible enough.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
His paranoid delusions are just that, delusions. Do not worry, continue your research as you have fellow humans and ignore the warming trend on your^H^H^H^H our planet
-- taking over the world, we are.
Assuming that the general chaos resulting from the news that aliens are attacking the world by trying to take over our computers does not do more damage in the first place..
IF there are aliens out there, IF they would want to attack us, wouldn't more 'conventional' weapons like 'The Magnificent Death Ray' or 'Anti-Gravity Bombs' be even more likely then that the first alien life-form we come in contact with are a bunch of script-kiddies ?
Although it would strike fear in my heart if a first message would contain the letters 'a/s/l?'
[This box got pwned by Aliens]
How to Destroy Angels II
This common misconception shows that although Richard Carrigan may be a fine particle physicist, he doesn't really know much about computer viruses. Please, folks... If you're going to cite someone as an "expert", make sure they've at least got a clue about the topic in question.
To properly debunk this person's fearmongering though, let's remember a little program called "crashme":
- Generate a file full of random bits.
- Try to execute that file.
- Repeat from the beginning.
It was a great way to find flaws in the robustness of user space verses system space, back when Linux was young. (A user program should never be able to crash the whole system.) There are two amazing things about this program:A distant civilization will have no knowledge of our computer systems' machine language and it would be impossible for them to guess. There are so many ways we could have arranged such things. Any information coming from them would essentially be random data as far as computer instructions go, even if it contained enough patterns to show that it came from a sentient source.
Nobody executes raw data! Even SETI wouldn't execute their data. They'd analyze it, plot it, and try to decipher it but they're not going to name it "ALIEN.EXE" and try to run it like a program. But what if they did?
Well, this "crashme" program has been doing just that, for more than a decate and on many machines. No viruses yet.
This "SETI virus" scare is just a plot device for a low budget movie. It's a shame that it even made it onto slashdot.
It's interesting how scientists in the US are really pondering something that has such a remote chance of success - while at the same time going completely against Kyoto targets.
I think the climate change has a higher chance of causing us major pain, than that we'll catch the "alien virus" through Seti@home any time soon.
Oh - and even if the current US government should be right that the Kyoto targets aren't far reaching enough - but that shouldn't be ANY excuse not to start off trying to at least achieve THOSE. If the US really thinks Kyoto wouldn't be enough - then DO MORE instead of procrastinating while doing (next to?) nothing...
See what happens when you mix tequila benders and cheesy movies like Independence Day?
Because, you know, twenty million years ago when ET sent that virus radio signal, they just knew we'd be using Microsoft Windows XP SP2 with a graphics rendering engine vulnerability that would allow them to gain full remote code execution access if they merely exploited the distributed internet computing Seti-at-Home program. With this brilliant forsight, the ETs decided to cause widespread computing mayhem and thereby distrupt Christmas internet sales and harm the economy of an as yet non-existant species on a planet in the ass end of the galaxy twenty million years hence.
The risk to national security pales compared to the risk to our emerging digital economy. Imagine the anti-DRM schemes these aliens must have. We must outlaw ALL A/D converters, 'open' radio receivers, and software defined radio research! If anyone converts those alien signals from analog to digital form, we're done for!
Facts:
1) Radio signals are part of the elctromagnetic spectrum and travel at the speed of light.
2) The nearest star (Proxima Centari) is 4.2 light years away.
3) The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across and we're near one edge (SETI is only really looking within the Milky Way, right?)
So we're looking at signals ranging from 4.2 years old to 100,000 years old. But wait, they'd need to learn about our computer systems before they could write any malicious code: light/radio signals from earth need to reach them first. So, their viruses will have been written for system from 8.4 to 200,000 years old. Anyone out there running an 8 year old system is probably too frustrated with how slow it is already without running SETI@home on it. At the other end of this time-frame though... Has everyone updated their virus definitions on their abaci?
According to this guy's bio, he's retired.
And with that, we can conclude he is crazy, as clearly evidenced by his outright ideas.
(and yes, I actually work at Fermilab)
Then, it must be capable of infecting the target system. A virus must be written for the target machine AND the target operating environment. A virus written for 80x86 (Pentium class) machines will do nothing on Apple computers, and vice versa. Even if it is written for the 80x86 series of machines, that's still not good enough. A virus written for 80x86 Windows cannot infect 80x86 Linux-based machines because the means to access the system is different for each. Nor is there a way for the program to query the operating system to find out which machine its on without faulting if it tries the wrong query.
Further, infections generally are caused by
The possibility of a non-Terran (off-earth) extraterrestrial entity creating a virus that could infect Terran computers through SETI is essentially all but impossible. I don't know if the odds can be calculated but they are probably in the multi trillion-to-one against category. Virus must be specifically written for target environment and have correct instruction set, must target correct operating system, must have means to create execution vector to inject itself into target machine, must have access to means to trigger execution of vector. Unless all of those things happen the scenario is impossible. Thus the odds of this being a reality are so near zero as to be rounding error.
Now, if you want to argue some malicious cracker on Terra might figure a way to do this, the odds are still low but you'll get no argument from me about that scenario being much more plausible (although still unlikely.)
Paul Robinson
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
i am almost positive that we have communicated with other beings in the universe with seti, otherwise why would we contiune? I wonder what message we send with seti, or receive??
The search for SETI is what, sending out signals hoping for an answer? In essence we are jumping up and down saying "come meet us".
I'd say that the greater threat would be of physical invasion of some kind. I know, the physics and astronomy types will point out that it is likely that any recipient will not be able to reach here without 100s of years of travel, but still.
Think Columbus when he was investigating the Caribbean and meeting some American Indians. Suppose he had seen some kind of long-range smoke signals from, say, the Iriqois in NE US. Think he wouldn't have abandoned the Caribbean to seek out the new, more advanced makers of the long-range smoke signals? Whatever Columbus' goals, his followers ended up decimating the Amercian Indians and conquering two whole continents of people.
Even if the first contact was made with us from freindship seeking extraterrestrials, those that follow might not be so benevolent.
I'm not too paranoid about this, I'm not against the search for SETI programs. It just seems to me that we're acting very foolish. My idea would be to have a two-pronged program. (1) Push development of passive listening and other searching capability to look for evidence of others and (2) Push development of ways to camaflage our presence and apparent level of technological development. If it turns out that other life exists and is no threat to us, is so advanced it doesn't care about us, is truly freindly, etc. then it won't matter our precautions. If it turns out that life exists and is not so benevolent, then the precautions will not have been in vain.
This seems only prudent from a military and security standpoint. Honestly, I'm surprised there isn't somewhat of a movement against the search for SETI for this very reason. I guess most people just don't think there is any other life out there.
My first question to him would be: how do you figure ETs far enough away to need to infect us via SETI signals would figure out what they needed to put in to actually infect our computers? They'd need to know what software we were using, what hardware we were using, what instruction set to use in their code. How are they going to figure all that out from dozens or hundreds of light-years away? And if they're actually here, close enough to monitor our networks and figure out all they'd need to have figured out, why not bypass SETI entirely and just attack directly through our networks themselves? And finally, how are they supposed to have kept up with lag? The nearest star they could be attacking from is 4.3 light-years away. Assuming they can analyze signals and determine attack vectors instantly, that means any attack that gets back to us is going to be targeted at what we were using 8 and a half years ago. How likely is that to work against more modern systems?
I think the guy may have a Ph.D., but he's not thinking at all about some of the practical aspects.
For a good exploration of this scenario, read His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Considering the claim that intelligent life is present abundantly, I can only assume that SETI has already been hacked and extra terrestial malware is jamming the signal detection software of SETI to mask their existence. We are too late...
DEAR SIR,
CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS PROPOSAL
HAVING CONSULTED WITH MY COLLEAGUES AND BASED ON THE INFORMATION GATHERED FROM THE CENTAURI CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY, I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO REQUEST FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE TO TRANSFER THE SUM OF #47,500,000.00 (FORTY SEVEN MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND GEESAK COMMONWEALTH GOLTONS) INTO YOUR ACCOUNTS. THE ABOVE SUM RESULTED FROM AN OVER-INVOICED CONTRACT, EXECUTED COMMISSIONED AND PAID FOR ABOUT FIVE YEARS (5) AGO BY A INTERSTELLAR CONTRACTOR. THIS ACTION WAS HOWEVER INTENTIONAL AND SINCE THEN THE FUND HAS BEEN IN A SUSPENSE ACCOUNT AT THE CENTRAL BANK OF CENTAURI APEX BANK...
The alien race would have to be advanced enough to predict, with perfect accuracy (a) how our whole computer infrastructure works and (b) how the software used to interpret their signals works fifty years before we could even conceive of the technology used to do a and b. Finally, they would have to know that we would be listening to signals from space trying to interpret them.
If this race of malevolent aliens could do this, why would they bother with us? I'm not saying aliens that advanced couldn't be malevolent enough to do that, but it would be beneath them, it would be like spending resources to predict where ants were going to travel next, and then putting bad food out for them, just to watch them wriggle. I'm intelligent enough to do that, but because I'm intelligent enough to do that, I've got better things to do with my time.
If ET can hack a speak-n-spell, who's to say he couldn't hack a data the SETI server or data stream. ;-)
401 - Attention span not found
Windows is God's fault! Wait a minute, that would mean God makes mistakes. Which would make him not ... ooops.
Everyone gets it wrong about "Independence Day" and the plausibility of them injecting a computer virus into the Alien's mainframe. When Dr. Brackish Okun (Brent Spiner) talks about the alien craft they found 50 years ago, he say's "We haven't been able to get anything to work, except the computer" They had 50 years to study the computer and figure it out, not several days for David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum)to craft a virus on his Macintosh laptop. Now, whether 50 years is enough time to understand a fully alien instruction set is debatable, but it is plausible.
People assume that the aliens are all supersmart and understand their systems. It's possible that they bought everything from the lowest bidder and don't understand it anymore than Alf understood his spaceship. "I don't know how it works, I just turn the key and it goes." If their purchase/upgrade cycle is > 50 years, they may indeed have exploitable holes in their OS.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Fred Hoyle & John Elliot's "A for Andromeda" (IMDB link)
(be warned, contains spoilers...)
And let me say, it was *better* than most sci-fi you get on TV nowadays!
In the long run we are all dead. - John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)
...welcome our new SETI-hacking overlords.
Neal Stephenson is a very good writer of science fiction, but in the case of the metavirus from outer space, the emphasis is on the word "fiction", not the word "science".
It seems we're still looking for intelligent life on Earth? Doh, we're supposed to check a signal for a threat before we know the signal exists? That's really bright. Almost as bright is that he thinks there are aliens intelligent enough to be a security risk to our mish-mash of computer technologies they've not had a chance to study (if they've had a chance then we have bigger problems) AND he thinks we can somehow stop them from attacking our network by plugging a copy of Norton somewhere in the system? Brilliant.
I for one won't be afraid until a strange multi-dimensional bird shows up in my mail box.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Just to help ET, I will begin broadcasting all of the technical specs that describe the x86 and x86-64 processors out into space. Hopefully by time they receive the specs, create a virus, send it, and we receive it, we should have standardized on a single instruction set. As an added advantage for ET, I will also send Aleph One's buffer overflow document so they know how to exploit our machines.
Back to reality, ET probably has the hookup on some good snow crash. That's what we need to worry about.
its a book by james gunn that predicts the creation of SETI. here's an interview
-- no karma, no whore
This guy has seen too many movies in which humans and aliens run the same CPU architecture and operating system. And shouldn't anyone nerdy enough to write about SETI know better?
In the future everyone uses OSX, like they use windows now. After the great SCO wars there was nothing else to use.
All Hail to our Alien Masters
In case you don't know SETI stands for The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.
& b=179295
It is a passive experiment, designed only to look for signals, not to send them. However, humankind has been unintentionally transmitting signals into space - primarily high-frequency radio, television, and radar - for more than fifty years. Our earliest TV broadcasts have reached several thousand nearby stars, although any alien viewers would have to build a very large antenna (thousands of acres in size) to detect them.
From http://www.seti.org/site/lookup.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE
The project that could be risky is CETI - Communication with ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. Unlike SETI, which is a passive, listening pursuit, CETI attempts to initiate a dialogue with intelligent extraterrestrials. It does this by actively sending out coded signals at specific target stars, star clusters, or galaxies.
Since when does SETI do anything apart from analyse the signals it gathers? And (correct me if i'm wrong) but those signals arn't even binary. they have to go through an analogue-digital conversion before we can even analyse them. which puts them into a completely safe(non-executable) format. right? right? Or am i the idiot?
sudo killall humans
Your arguement assumes that aliens would even think like us and be emotionally driven by the same motivations, if they even had anything resembling our emotions. Our desire to be malicious is driven by a need to feel powerful, there is no reason to assume they'd have any such need.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
If SETI was infected by an alien virus - wouldn't that be a success on all accounts for SETI? The purpose of SETI is to discover extra terrestial intelligence. Being destroyed by something usually includes to "discover" it... Kylant
1. Someone will release an alien-proof firewall endorsed by god.
2. Flying Spagetti Monster releases an open source firewall.
3. The Babel fish is called in to give evidence in the patent dispute.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Rather, any extraterrestrial easter-egg would come with instructions for building the machine on which it would execute, and would bait people into building it with promises of an oracle of extraterrestrial knowledge.
Since we have yet to recieve the first bit of data from an extraterrestrial intelligence, I'm not going to worry about that.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
... the probability of this happening is very high. According to Colvard's Logical Premise, it's 50%. The people need to be warned!
Really, how can some smart enough to be in this guy's position really think that? I'm not going to pick his idea apart - it's already been done dozens of times above, but at what point do you just get a big stick and say, "Down mad scientist, down," in your sternest voice?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
who will sue us for stealing their client's content and distributing it illegally by P2P-networks...
Trust me, I work for the government.
Just pass a law to restrict ET sites to certain TCP/IP ports, then all we have to do is firewall them. Problem solved, thank you Mr. Yarro!
And hence it's natural that their Intelligent Design also led them to having Windows
But we all learned from Jeff Goldblum that the aliens are using OSX, since he was able to use his mac to upload a virus.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
The author of TFA clearly neither has a clue about SETI, nor about computers.
Malicious signal carrying malicious data? The best SETI can hope to "detect" is a short burst of CW, a narrowband signal. That's like detecting someone talking but not actually hearing any of the talking.
Never minding the whole "aliens hacking our boxen without knowing how they work". I bet this dude takes ``Independence Day'' as a plausible scenario too. What a tool.
Think aliens run windows or linux. they would have to download the correct version to get it run on thier DELL
Don't hate me because i'm windows....
I didn't know that ET was using the same computer systems that we use. Oh dear were all doomed, at least untell we give them a cold.
Won't the DMCA prevent this?
If they actually DID take over our machines we'd be able to sue them. I'd welcome the hack just to give the RIAA/MPAA someone else to sue.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Lets think real hard on this. Even IF ET was able to decode all the hardware/software of today create a virus and send it back in a quick enough time frame that it WAS able to infect comptuters. WHY WOULD THEY? These are aliens WAY ahead of us technologically. Would the "et loves you" virus be the biggest threat they could offer us? Oh no they crashed my email server sound a heck of a lot better to me than Oh no they sent a REAL virus to our planet and killed everyone.
Don't hate me because i'm windows....
We need to get one thing through our thick, ape-like skulls: We are not special. We're just a very specific combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen (and other stuff) that can be worried about invasions from outer space.
A long time ago, the prevailing theory was that the Earth was the center of the universe. Now we know that we're not physically the center of the universe, just a mediocre planet circling a mediocre star in a mediocre galaxy. We just need to learn that we're also not the intellectual center of the universe.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Say the signal travels for 20 years through space, (if the are fairly close to earth) and they have an information lag on earth history of 20 years, so these aliens had to precisely predict on information from 1965 what kind of computer we would build yesterday to hold the data...
Unless they have time machines, this strikes me as highly unlikely.
a new zombie network for extraterrestrial prOn!
just imagine the spam:
eNl@rge YoUr tEnt@cl3s
on the other hand it won't be long until some africans send them new opportunities to become rich.
I think it would be fair.
Monkeys and Typewriters aren't likely to produce anything meaningful at all in an information space as sparsely populated as that of "functional computer programs" and "meaningful language". Important disclosure: before you go clicking on that link, be aware that the conclusion of the article is supportive of creationism. The guts of the article is pure mathematics disguised as humour, but I know how touchy the average Slashdotter is about creationists, so don't say I tried to preach at you.
There are quite a few other probability-related articles on Nutters, such as Monkeys and the Lottery , Proverbial Probability Problems , and What a coincidence! .
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
William Gibson gave me goosebumps in Neuromancer with something along these lines (don't want to completely spoil it for anyone). Who knows what kinda binary garbage we are spouting out there that another species could pick up. NASA shoots programs to its probes all over the place. That stuff could be intercepted and analyzed. So could some of the actual hardware itself. That stuff gets lost/abandoned all the time. I think the odds are very remote that anything sinister could happen to us, but the guy in TFA has a point, and it would not be impossible for some alien species who may already be in this neck of the woods to access our hardware/software, grok it and infiltrate our systems.
It is a highly anthropomorphic point of view that traditional space colonization or info-colonization are the paths that will be taken by advanced civilizations. These are concepts based on the relatively limited perspective of a few thousand years of human civilization and even shorter periods of infotech environments. It seems (to me) much more likely that advanced civilizations will replicate through a process similar to the self-replication process one sees in single cells (e.g. bacteria) and not the infectious parasite process one sees with viruses. The problem is that self-replication of advanced civilizations requires extremely close encounters between the developed resource (presumably a solar system, mega-ship or mega-intelligence like a Matrioshka Brain) with a resource of similar or greater mass & energy capacity. Such a resource should be largely undeveloped (like our solar system but much more likely regions of space where new stars are being created). This allows for self-replication over sub-light-year distances. Given the high energy/mass cost of navigating entire solar systems or mega-ships/intelligences as well as the common trajectories of natural objects in our galaxy such "close encounters" are very infrequent (occuring only over millions to billions of years).
(And for those of you who doubt navigating solar systems is feasible you need to go read related papers by Dyson or Criswell.)
I am Mr. Glorsoid The manager, Bills and exchange At the foreign remittance department of the Martian International bank plc. I am writing this letter to Ask for your support and cooperation to carry out this business opportunity in my department. We discovered an abandoned sum of $15,000,000.00 (fifteen million United States dollars only) in an account that belongs to one of our foreign customers who died along with his entire family of a wife and two children in November 1997 in a saucer crash. Since we heard of his Death, We have been expecting his next of kin to come over and put claims for his money as the Heir. Unfortunately, neither their family member nor distant relative has ever appeared to claim the said Fund. Upon this discovery, I and other officials in my Department have agreed to make business with you and release the total amount into your account as the Heir. Please return an e-mail that encloses your private contact telephone Number, fax number full name and address and your designated bank coordinates to enable us file letter of claim to the appropriate departments for necessary Approvals before the transfer can be made. Note also, this transaction must be kept strictly confidential because of its nature, I look forward to receiving Your prompt response. Regards, Mr. Glorsoid
It makes no sense except to fill a Hollywood plot that alien's would be evil, malevolent creatures bent on distruction or take over of our planet.
First of all, this idea suggests that there is already a very advanced race of alien's out their that have grown tired of exploration and research and just bent on harvesting resources from other worlds or simply bored and looking to destroy as many worlds as possible.
From what we have been made aware of, through Seti and astro physics is that life on other planets so far is unique to only our own, and even if there is life on other plants, it is extremely rare.
Why then would an alien race even consider the destruction of another planet? I think any significantly advanced race of aliens capable of interstellar travel would enjoy meeting another race and working in cooperation to help both of us improve our view of the rarity of life in our universe.
It would be far different if we have ample and obvious proof that life existed on other planets. If we could hear alien signals, or could easily assertain that life widely existed in other solar systems then I would be fearful. Like in any culture or species on Earth, once land or resources run out, it is typical for the dominant species to aggresively seek out more space or more resources. I could then very easily see an alien race, filling their homeworld to maximum population and straining their supply of essential resources, striking out and taking over another world out of despiration.
This isn't the case. As far as we can tell, we are singular in the universe, but even if not the case, there is no suggestion that an alien world would seek out to destroy us.
Secondly, the idea that aliens could simply write a computer virus that would take out our technology is ludicrous. How would they have any understanding of our computer technology to write an effective virus? Viruses work because they emulate software and are executable by computers. Alien's couldn't just write any software, they would have to know how our programs work in order to make an effective virus. If order to do that, they would either already have to be on our planet, or near enough to capture wireless transmissions. If that were the case, then there are easier ways to sabotage or destroy our population then sending a virus to take down our internet.
Ideas of beaming viruii to destroy our technology and Internet are just crazy Hollywood ideas. Its not even an original plot, any "scientist" claiming that this is a serious issue isn't worth his weight in popcorn.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
and then they all unleash their weapons and only true pan-breeds like myself will survive (white, black, yellow, red -- take your pick, I have it in my family) :-)
THAT would be nice, because it would be _far_ more difficult to have prejudices based on any appearance trait
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
What happen?
Somebody set us up the bomb.
We get signal.
What!
Main screen turn on.
It's you!!
How are you gentlemen!!
Ivanova: How much time?
Corwin: Three minutes!
Ivanova: Standing by to transmit.
Sheridan [troubled]: Commander --- the message we got from the probe. What did it promise if we did give all the right answers?
Ivanova: Advanced tech, mainly. Medical information, cures for disease, new jumpgate technology.
Sheridan: But it never gave you the name of the race or where it's from?
Ivanova: I assume we get that information once we pass the test.
Corwin: Two minutes!
Ivanova: Okay, here we go!
Sheridan: No, wait! [Everyone turns to stare.] There's something about this that has been bothering me ever since they made contact! We have been operating under the assumption that whoever sent the probe is deciding whether or not a sentient race is fit to survive based on what they know at the moment of contact. But if that's true, why give them a leg up on more advanced technologies?
Ivanova: Maybe they were feeling generous!
Sheridan: No, if they were feeling generous, they wouldn't be wiping out inferior races based on lack of advancement. No, I don't like it!
Ivanova: Captain, we're down to one minute! I don't see any other options here!
Sheridan: What if it's a berserker --- a probe sent out to find life forms advanced enough to pose a threat to the race that created it? It sends a list of questions backed by a threat. If it gets the right answers back, that proves a certain level of technological advancement, then boom ! You wipe out a potential enemy without leaving any trace of where you came from!
Ivanova: Or it could be exactly what it said! Fifteen seconds, Captain! Send or no send?
Sheridan: No send!
Ivanova: Oh, boy!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois
The notion that a SETI signal needs to be "decontaminated" is plausible only to people who watch too much Independence Day or Star Trek(where the most implausible feature, contrary to popular opinion, is not FTL travel, but the fact that all the computer systems in the galaxy seem to be more or less compatible).
To put it bluntly: there is no way in hell that a SETI signal is going to infect anything.
Even if it did, what would it do? Transfer thousands of dollars to Alpha Centauri? Dial galactic 1-900 numbers? Cause vacation snapshots to be transmitted via Arecibo into space? Cause Windows machines to reboot all over the nation? Kill us all by finally revealing in public Monty Python's killer joke?
What I can't figure out is whether Carrigan is merely incredibly stupid, or whether he knows that his statements are nonsense and is opportunistic. Is he perhaps annoyed at the success of efforts like SETI and wants to create FUD? Is he trying to kill funding for other branches of physics? Or is he trying to get funding for his own pet project? My money is still on "stupid and arrogant", but I'm willing to be convinced of the other possibility.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Canada bans SETI in preparation for Intergalactic War.
Scientist: "Sir, we've got a signal!"
General: "Put it up on screen!"
Screen: "MZ... This program cannot be run in DOS mode..."
General: "Execute it!"
Scientist: "But sir! We haven't run NAV LiveUpdate for a while!"
General: "That's an order!"
It's hard to predict the form that such a 'virus' might take. Just making up random stuff off the top of my head: they could leave us a story about such irrelevant subjects like the history of an ancient tribe lost in some desert for 40 years but as a result of reading this story the readers' beheviour might be irrevocably changed so that they are no longer capable of understanding basic biology. You simply wouldn't be able to tell merely by skimming the subject matter as the effect would be embedded within hidden triggers. By leaving enough of these subtle 'viruses' spread out through our culture they could bring our civilization to its knees without us even realizing that we've been the victim of alien attack.
The problem with ET signals is not viruses. It is impossible for SETI signals to purposely infect a terrestrial computer system--our systems are just too primitive for that--and no level of technical advancement on their part will fix that.
The real problem with ET signals is social engineering. That is, ETs constructing a message to us telling us to build something that we think is beneficial but that is actually harmful. Why would they do that? Maybe as a cosmic practical joke, who knows. Those scenarios have been explored at length in science fiction.
someone has watched independance day too many times
For copyright violation when recording their broadcast flagged emissions.
\u262D = \u5350
Maybe the Real Risk of SETI and the Earth Radiowaves is that when the big-friendly alien signal comes, it hits a nice EM frequency that effectively nukes all of us?
Note that the signal wave would need to be strong enough to get to Earth and that the alien make-up might be very different than that in our cell/neuclear material...
..bright screens for bright people, but now I've got to wear sunglassess.
Is an excellent book by Vernor Vinge which has some nods in this direction, but it's science fiction... I think the odds of this are about zero unless our understanding of physics is even more pathetic than it probably is...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This article strikes me as having the same sort of human-centric hubris as the folks who think aliens have some urgent need to abduct hicks from the American backwoods. Why on earth (or off it) would they bother hacking our primitive, barely connected, slow-as-treacle, uninteresting computers?
If are any worthwhile long-range hacks to be made upon the unsuspecting people of earth, they're memetic.
That I am a malicious hacker and I want to take over the computers of some unknown civilisation which may come to exist on a planet hundreds of lightyears away long after I am dead.
The algorithm goes like this:
Now, even supposing this were possible (and it seems to me that the size of the data set you'd generate would be up about the region of aleph four), and supposing (say) the Intel 86x processor family continues to be used for a thousand years, and that (say) Linux 2.4.21 continues to be used on those processors for the whole of that time, and that BOINC 5.2.8 continues to be used on that operating system kernel for the whole of that time, what are the chances of
To express this as a business plan
Only a culture with precisely zero mathematical understanding could possibly imagine this being a risk.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Ugent Greeting
Dear Sir/Madam,
I greet you in the name of our lord . My name is Mrs Quuxforbz Foooxbar. I am a widow and a mother of three all girls.....
I've already drowned, you insensitive clod!
Ok. Clearly, this guy has some valid concerns about aliens either being malicious, or unintentionally harmful to us -- like Europeans trading blankets to the american aboriginals.
And clearly, he has zero knowledge of signal processing. The signals we pick up and pass into SETI are collected and chopped up and dumped into packets. These packets have headers. If the packet headers are corrupted, they can cause buffer overruns which can lead to arbitrary code execution. But... we craft the headers.
For the aliens to "infect" us, there would have to be earth-side interference, in the form of a maliciously altered header, a transmission error due to a faulty router or bug in code. The probability of this occuring cotemporaneous to an evil alien supervirus signal is so negligable, I had trouble not falling out of my seat when I read the article.
To welcome our 1447 hackzor-space-alien-overlords? Or did my firewall scare them off?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
STFU, carbonoid!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Yeah, you probably don't even think it strange that there were three alien invasion series running simultaneously. You probably think it mere coincidence that Invasion took place in the aftermath of a hurricane. Do you think FEMA is really that inept at providing aid? They were more concerned with quarentining the area to keep the aliens from escaping.
Do von Neumann machines suffer from buffer overruns?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
SUN : The signal is the alien.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The chances of an extraterrestial civilization being within 20 years of technology development is very slim -- it is likely there will be a huge technical disparity, probably in favor of the ETs. Look at the difference in technology between us and our own societies 50 years ago. Especially considering the fact the ETs would have figured out how to traverse large distances in space, you can assume they'd trounce us technologically. Our best hope is that they will consider us unintelligent, unattractive and inedible, and leave us alone!
They might have stolen my saved slashdot cookie and already started posting n00b jokes!
Due to the fact of the wide adoption of the cryptic x86 architecture on our planet there is absolutelly no reason to asume that aliens might infiltrate our IT. The famous x86 architecture is immune to such attacks because it employs ultra modern SBCI (security by cryptic imbecility) technology which provides best security for the years to come.
... ... ...
... maybe it's *completely different*:
....
While the aliens are still puzzled what actual purpose the A20 gate might suit, INTEL is already implementing the next cryptic SSE stage, which, at first covered secretly by a "8086 compatibility mode", will cause further confusions and throwbacks amongst the hostile alien forces on its discovery
Wait!
maybe it where the men in black (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_Black ) who foisted x86 technology to us poor erdlings only for the purpose to subdue human technological progress !11!??!1!??! What has Windows to do wtih that??? Why does Bill Gates always behave somewhat odd and "noticeably unfamiliar with everyday common courtesies and civil behavior"? Do Andy Groove and Bill Gates drive Cadillacs? Oh so many suspicions!11!!!1
Knock, knock
dfniuwbfnb berjnw [carrier lost]
With the amount of pollution we're churning out, the earth has the equivalent of a tinfoil hat.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
How does one learn about physics without understanding the rules of physics? The answer is experimentation. It would be beneficial to the alien threat if they had some output. Maybe they have ultra-sensitive EM detectors and they are technologically capable of separating out all the EM sources on the planet and using that for output. If they could do that, they wouldn't really need to experiment so much.
Personally I'm more worried about software along the lines of DNA. Transmission causes errors, right? This is parallel to DNA and mutation. Given enough time of bit-errors and you'll come up with a sentient software by evolution. It starts with very simple software that just repeats itself. Soon it will add in an iteration to that repeat. Next thing you know it will be the digital equivalent of a sentient brain!
The question is whether it knows we are here and what will it do when it finds out?
If you're having a problem with your software, our G.I.T.S. are standing by to ask you dumb questions.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
If I remember correctly, Jeff Goldblum's character in "Independence Day" was able to pwn the alien mothership by uploading a virus to it from his Macintosh PowerBook. Clearly, computer systems are interoperable galaxy-wide at a fundamental level. Perhaps Windows has even evolved independently on many different planets. In any case, we're clearly in deadly danger.
The big question, of course, is what the aliens will do once they've taken over our PCs. My guess is that they'll use them to send spam. The danger is that by the time our inboxes start filling with tentacle-enlargement spams and three-headed lizard porn, it will be too late for us to do anything.
I think its more likely that the evil aliens would just "beam" malicious programs into all of our computers from their orbiting cruisers.
Then they could deplete our planetary resources by selling us fake rolexes and male potency fixes and setting us all up with dates.
I think its time to start digging a bunker in the back yard.
In the first Species movie Ben Kingsley downloads a DNA sequence from a SETI, inserts into a human egg, and the resulting creature is some super-sexy super-monster who tries to spread her DNA all over the place.
> Frankly, I'm more worried about some phishing malcontent then I am
> about the Grays, but maybe that's just me.
Frankly, I'm more worried about the government keeping the signal to itself than about it getting out in the general public. The design for a hyper-intelligent AI that can be enslaved by someone in power to use it to gain control of the Earth, or, hell, just a personal force field and ray gun, for god's sake.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Piers Anthony, in the great SciFi novel Macroscope, proposed such a signal being delivered in a tachyon stream. Humans above a certain IQ were able to grasp what started out as a simple symbolic pattern matching program, which progressed step by step in complexity and speed until the mind was in a sort of rapture state of comprehension - the viewer couldn't shut their eyes, and the terrible "logic" drew to a conclusion that burned out the brain. I think anyone under IQ 120 (or something) was unaffected because they couldn't follow the pattern beyond the basics. The smarter you were, the more burned you got.
Again, we need to imagine a civ advanced almost beyond our comprehension, and equally evil, but it's an interesting concept as it was depicted in that novel. I think it's about as likely as a universally-effective computer virus (which is to say, near-nil.)
The entire premise behind ET hacking SETI is ironic if you think about it, nothing more.
Personally, if I was an alien, I would hack something else, SETI would be somewhere on the bottom of my list.
If I just needed to hack one computer to replicate my AI virus, I would go for some college kids computer that is running windows unpatched. Easy, and sure.
Otherwise, if I needed important computer systems, I think Dept of Def. is a little more important then SETI. Or, financial institutions, but put simply, anything BUT SETI for importance.
Maybe they would hack SETI for distribution purposes. HAHA But MS has a much better dist. network (patches go out to just about everyone with a PC). As does about every company out there.
Put simply, there is just no logical reason that someone would hack SETI above any of the millions of other good alternatives. On the slightly funnier side, they may do it to show a sense of humor (at irony.)
Somebody with a bug in their ear.
An alien smart enough to do anything remotely like this is smart enough to not bother with a planet full of monkeys - unless they want to convert us to something other than monkeys - in which case I say:
I for one welcome our new SETI overlords!
This guy should be worrying about what George Bush is listening to, not what the "aliens" are sending...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
> decide to enslave us.
> IANASFB (I am not a science fiction buff) but I presume this type of scenario has been discussed.
See Stargate (and SG-1).
Oh yea, sure.. first we were afraid of giant mutant eyeballs with tentacles. Now we are afraid of Magical Evil 1's and 0's?
Don't mistake lack of talent for genius
When are we going to see pseudoscience.slashdot.org brought to life?
And when will this fark-worthy newz be kept off the front page? Inquiring minds need to know.
All these arguments about how an ET signal could not harm a current model computers are correct. They would have to know something about our computers, the instruction sets operating systems and so on. Even if they did manage to get a virus in, so what? We know how to manages viruses. In the worst case the computer catches fire and melts. Big deal buy a new one. Even a million dead PCs is not a "Big Deal" But what they _Could_ do is send a series of instructions teling us the basics of how one of _thier_ computers work. Reading these instructions would be irresistable to us. Then they would send a program. The program could be a simulation of one of them, a (to us) very advanced inteligent being. We could talk to this simulation and learn a lot about the ETs without the long speed of light delay. Everyone would want to talk to these simulated ETs, it would be widely copied and distributed Remember the story of the Trojan Horse. It was a very atractive gift that the Trojans welcomed into thier city, only later did they discover the bad side effects. I really do expect that a REAL ET transmition would include a simulation of the ET's best technical experts, performers and artists along with vertual reality tours of their world. They would not be sending us text books. That is "so 1980's" They would send us copies (or simulations) of themselves. Now we ask "what happens when two cultures make contact when one of them is much more advanced?"
Stop laughing, this is really serious threat!
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
It's been well known for some years that the earth is a huge computer calculating the question to which the answer is 42 (or the other way round ;) ). This guy is an alien technician sent to earth to make sure the calculations go right. Want proof? Go check his personal library for examples of horrid poetry :)
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
I hope you're happy.
Easy, we just assign a specific port number for alien attacks. Or we might assign a special "alien" bit to be set in packets. Alien signals should have the alien bit set to 1 so that one could easily filter out alien attacks... :-P
If you get this, we're 10 of a kind.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Any computer language, from machine language including those languages runnable on computers, but understandable by trained humans like Java, involves a large number of essentially arbitrary decisions. Which "opcode" is going to represent which functionality? Without this knowledge, it is difficult to imagine anyone, no matter how advanced, writting code that will not immediately crash.
It is possible to write multi-platform viruses, but only with knowledge for all target platforms.
If a alien race were to take the trouble to determine how our computer languages were designed -- then it could determine how to infect us! But this info is not available from popular entertainment broadcasts!
But enough computer programs are transfered via wireless networks that the inforation could be had there!
So SETI, is not a risk! TV is not a risk! But Wireless networks are a risk, and must be shutdown immediately!
Personally, I think it is a simple answer: They don't. I think it is an easy thought experiment to imagine what would happen if aliens were to make their presence known to humanity at large. There would be two kinds of people; those who would worship the aliens and those that would want to kill them. I hope, for everyone's sake, that any aliens advanced enough to travel here and observe us would also understand that we, as a race, are not yet ready to meet them.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I can't wait to find alien popups from Alpha Centauri telling me how I can increase the size of my tenticles by up to 4 inches!
Isn't this article supposed to be on topic "It's funny. Laugh."?
ATM machines? automated teller machine machines? and you call youirself a geek!
copyright © 2005 Flamsmsmark the ravings of a melancholly i
The Blight is the nemesis of galactic ciivilization in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep". It spreads like a multi-level virus and once it infects a star system, all neighbors must turn their dishes away from it and destroy any vessel from there, lest they be contaminated too.
Whatever level on which you connect to an infected system, you'll receive information that is probing your systems, overflowing buffers, trying to subvert system security. For instance if you tuned into a video stream you might get charismatic people telling you how good life is over there, and how corrupt your own leaders are...
Somebody needs a reality check.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Oh my. I guess it could happen. If BOINC SETI code had a bug then caused execution to pick up in the data area, think of something like a nop sled to get you there, AND the alien signal was h/w specific and alignment was just right and the code bump occured on the right architecture 9above dependency) then viola! You're off and running. NOW THAT IS SOME FINE PIECE OF ALIEN INTELLIGENCE! But, this isn't independence day so ID4 or not... Peace!
All your base is are belong to ET.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
call Paul Hellyer, the former Canadian Minister of Defence who wants to hold public hearing about exopolitics (http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11 /25/1956232&tid=214&tid=219). Together, they may come up with more creative and entertaining things for us to worry about.
With the exception of a very small number of high-power transmissions aimed at particular stars, there's basically zero chance of any ET civilization picking up signals from Earth.
I really ought to have hung on to the calculations I made for the last SETI discussion I participarted in, but the inverse-square law ensures that the power of an unfocused radio transmission decreases dramatically over interstellar distances.
Basically, it'd be a near thing for current SETI programs to pick up a radio signal aimed directly at the Earth from a nearby star, with a transmitter channeling a few million watts into a tight (well, relatively so) beam. There's zero chance that we'd be able to detect the equivalent of TV transmissions from 10 light years away or so.
Even if the ETs have significantly better receiving equipment, they'll still be limited by background noise. They also have to deal with the rather huge number of candidate stars to monitor - unless you're willing to devote an enormous amount of resources, you'll only be able to survey a small number of stars at any time.
This is known as Convergent evolutio.... er... rather: Convergent Intelligent Design.
-tid242
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
Not only that, that information is not yet available elsewhere (you can't beat c).
Were that I say, pancakes?
Marge: "You speak English!"
Kang: "Actually, I'm speaking Rigelian, but by an amazing coincidence, the two languages are exactly the same."
Seriously, does this sound likely to you?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Maybe the REAL threat is that we'd receive a message like this:
My Dear Friend:
Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is former Adjutant Sub-Chancellor Glaybok Drofnakooz of the Betelgeuse Commerce Guild, and I wish to bring to your consideration a possible transaction that may be of great interest to you. Over 40 skoofs ago (150 of your earth years) my family was given the task of administering the Gumblqaag Memorial Hypergate in our system for the purpose of seeing to its vital role in the transport of goods to our galactic trading partners. For this service we were permitted to collect tolls as set by treaties negotiated by the guild with other users of the hypergate. From these tolls we paid for the operating expenses of the hypergate, including maintenance staff salaries, futures contracts for the harvesting of vacuum energy, and subspace postage stamps. The remainder was allowed to be kept by our family and was deposited as negative entropy in quantum wells during our administration.
In recent skoofs, the cosmo-political turmoil of our region has resulted in the coming to power of a fundamentalist regime that has crushed the Guild and nullified the hereditary contracts of the Guild members. In addition, these fundamentalists have insisted on changing the local values of physical constants (such as the fine-structure constant and the mass of the proton) to ones that they claim are given in scriptures handed down from their sovereign deity, also known as the Ke'Ernul. As a result of their actions, our negative-entropy deposits in the quantum wells (which are of substantial value in free markets elsewhere) are no longer physically accessible in our region of the galaxy.
It is for this reason that I turn to you with this modest proposal. If you would be so kind as to provide a location chosen by you within your own solar system for the transmutation of this negative entropy to a useable form of energy, I would be pleased to provide yopu with the opportunity to capture as much of this energy as you wish for your own purposes. Since the total amount of this energy transaction approaches 2 x 10^49 J, or 100 times the total mass-energy of your own sun, your capture of even 1% of this energy would allow your solar system to survive for an additional 2.5 billion skoogs beyond its present estimated lifetime. As the physical constants in your area are as yet undisturbed by the fundamentalists, the transmutation should be most effective and occur within a time period of 20 kruffs, or 3 of your earth minutes.
I beseech you to participate in this modest transaction, and look forward to your response so that I may begin to make arrangements with former trading partners near your system.
Your most humble servant,
Glaybok Drofnakooz
Former Adjutant Sub-Chancellor
Betelgeuse Commerce Guild
The one thing that every virus writer must know is how the machine he is infecting works. That's because the virus is a program that runs on the pc (try writing a Win32 application, using Mac system calls) and because it trys to jump through holes to do damage (which takes even more knowledge of the system.) If these aliens know that much about our technology, they could fabricate phony games and drop them off at any flea market, and wait for someone to find them. Heck, they could counterfit coppies of XP and sell them on eBay, or just dial in and infect us.
Yes, a massively superior computer might be able to find holes we never imagined in our systems, just like our computers can crack a WW1 cypher in seconds, but that does not mean that they can do it without knowing our basic computers, which requires paying us a visit to learn about them. Once they are here, they do not need to go through SETI.
Even if they hijacked a communications satellite, and stole the code to Windows Longhorn, it would be easier to beam the virus from that satellite after it miracuously "recovers" than to enter through SETI.
Andy Out!
...work out how to pronounce the number "#ERANGE".
Or possibly his calculator couldn't represent 0 to enough significant places.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You'd have to already have the metavirus in order to recognise it in the string of trash. Information Theory 101.
Same problem with natural selection: the selection process has to "engage" with the selectable item(s) but the homeostasis built into most biological processes acts very strongly to prevent this.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Let's just take a couple of aimed shots:
.max
1. the time since we became "visible" dates to the formation of a terrestrial oxygen-nitrogen atmoshpere, not Marconi. Look up nulling interferometric spectrometry and bounce it against extrasolar planetology.
2. We have, in fact been sending out not-so-subtle clues as to how our computers work for decades, along variosly narrow volumes of space. huh? wha? How do you think we communicate with our space probes? How did we REPROGRAM the mars landers? It's not quite a blueprint to the internet or a microprocessor or a language, but it's infinitely more information about how things work than "nothing". Again: some information about how our computers work is travelling at the speed of light along the plane of the eccliptic.
Now, assuming a civilization of, oh, say, an avg. IQ about the same as ours, but with 1e5 years of industrial age+ technology under their belts, recalculate your limbaughesque smirkings taking into account 1) and 2) above.
I can't see where a SETI attack is forbidden by thermodynamics.
Which makes it possible.
gosh, that Carrigan guy is pretty smart, isn't he.
Publish or Perish.
The ''Great Wall'' analogy makes no sense. An effective attack can be attempted against the wall without any knowledge of its construction. The same is true of receivers, electronics, and computer systems -- most computers and receivers are not designed to blindly execute instructions passed to them, even if one wrote the perfect computer virus and sent it as a signal - you still need an infection vector written in a language understood by the receiver, to activate the thing --- this generally requires a bug to be found in the software processing the data.
Extraterrestrials might have learned a lot about the human race by picking up radio signals and other radio waves humans may have accidentally leaked into space a hundred years ago or so, but it's not too likely to give them SETI source code or much in the way of details about human computer designs --- at least not unless they live on a very near planet and have discovered WiFi and Unsecured Wireless access Points.
To create, let-alone manage to deploy a virus which would have any effect on humans or their computer machinery, the aliens would need to know a whole lot about the target, much more than aliens from a distant planet could know, and probably, and more than humans even know about themselves and their world.
Otherwise, the possibility is pretty much just the same as it would be for a computer virus infection to leap randomly out of radio noise (unrelated to extraterrestrial signals) and infect the SETI processors.
To engineer a virus against the human brain, the aliens would have to know a lot about its workings - too: the system might not be hard to take down against a strategic attack, but they do still have to get in first, and an attack deviced against a system without knowledge of it is not going to be strategic -- but brute force (like trying to send a signal so powerful that a receiver irradiates the planet when it picks it up).
The more realistic security threat involved with SETI is the one of human beings writing viruses and compromising other human beings' computers.
How about a simple answer to a stupid question: No, it's not a security risk. An alien transmission infecting a computer doing SETI is precisely as absurd as making a simple digital audio recording taking over your computer. Data is being collected, data is being manipulated, data is being analyzed. Data isn't being "executed," so there's no chance for infection.
Isn't it obvious?
SETI has successfully found something and it is either dangerous or valuable to the government, so they are shutting it down to cover it up.
This is similar to the Star Trek Voyager episode Friendship One. Sometime before the Federation a probe is sent out to tell aliens about earth. If the Borg intercepted the probe, Earth would likely be assimilated.
I may be reading this article totally out of context, but it sounds like they have been smoking a little too much grass and reading too many alien conspiracy books. If their worried about SETI being a security risk their bascially admitting that something might be out there! What have they got to worry about otherwise? SETI is just like any other research project that has unknowns, Isn't that the whole reason the SETI team is researching in the first place? to find an answer the unknowns? Theres too many "do gooders" sticking their ill-informed noses in things they know nothing about...
So...aliens that are light years away supposed to: 1) Guess our processor architecture, well enough to be able to write machine code that a computer could execute. Otherwise all they'd manage to do is crash a couple computers 2) Guess how we've set up the internet to work, as well as guess vulnerabilities for operating systems for their 'virus' to spread. What's the point in infecting a couple thousand computers? It would be pointless just to infect only computers that are running SETI, sure I suppose some geeks out there are using their companies' servers to crunch for SETI, but if they want to do any damage at all, the virus must spread, a virus by definition must spread and replicate. The internet seems the most logical and fastest avenue of infection. 3) Guess the holes in the SETI program. Otherwise, we humans will spend the next 20 years trying to figure out what the heck they're trying to say, when in fact it's a virus designed for the alien version of the commodor 64. Also, they'll have to deal with the limited bandwith (send it too fast, and we're more likely to miss an important part of it), so they're not going to be able to try sending a couple billion bytes to try different buffer over flows. And, they have to deal with data corruption, even if there's extreme redundancy in this highly impossible virus, there's only so much redundancy that can be done, the code that checks and makes sure there's no corruption could be corrupt itself and instead of taking over the world, it could merely start producing horribly written OSes and then pay consulting firms to give the OS good reviews as slashdotters post cruel comments about it. There's also one slight problem, sending a virus to destroy a civilization would be an act of war. Not only that, but your victim(s) would know where you are. If you're sending it as far and wide as possible (which is a must, it's pointless to only destroy 3/4ths of the galaxy's civilizations), you now have enemies who know where you are, but you haven't the slightest clue. It would be more feasible to provide plans for a 'free energy' device, that would actually be a bomb. No guessing what kind of computers were using, we'll kill ourselves. As a culture, we're stupid enough to fall for it, only 4% of internet users can identify a phishing site 100% of the time. Also, the author failed to realize one final thing. If this were at all possible, then there would also be a threat of the random background noise randomly being a 'virus'. As SETI expands, more and more data will be examined, if life can be created out of a some atoms joining together, then assuming the SETI software is vulnerable, might artificial life be created out of the millions of terabytes of random background noise? Probably not...but it's as believible as l337 4l13n5 h4x0r1ng 73h pl4n37.
That would be one scenario. We would have to be extremely careful if we decided to build anything that an ET sent us (e.g. completely understand the principles involved, etc). The biggest risk, of course, is that some ET is traveling in a spaceship ala Columbus and lands on our doorstep. We would be extremely lucky if we didn't end up like the American Indians.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
by erecting a fourteen mile fence south of san diego to staunch the flow of illegal aliens.
Why haven't we seen a computer virus take control of computers on a large scale? The attacker would need a whole lot of time and computational power in order to divine the functions and content of each computer controlled.
I believe it would be possible to achieve large-scale control of computers. It would take a few steps:
1. Infect as many computers as possible with a diverse set of viruses that access various IRC channels or FTP sites that you control.
2. Allow those viruses to escalate their privileges via code downloaded via IRC/FTP. Also have them acquire unique serial numbers.
3. Install rootkits to hide the viruses.
4. Have the computers to which you now have access record their IP address (internal and external) and a listing of programs that have been running plus frequency and duration periodically. They send that information to various servers that you control.
5. Create scripts to execute on particular machines, keyed by serial number.
6. ???
It's doable. It would be like crafting unique attacks against a large number of individual machines, though, and would require a large amount of computing power just to start.
The idea here is that these aliens are significantly more technologically advanced than we are. In that case, they can have whatever sophisticated weapons we can dream up. While subliminal messages may not be possible with our current technology, one can't totally discount the idea that a sufficiently advanced civilization would have means to plant a self-destructive suggestion into the minds of at least a large subset of the people on Earth. Subliminal messages seemed a convenient way of describing this, although no doubt the actual mechanism of placing the suggestion would be quite different.
BTW, the internet (snopes) agrees with you that subliminal messages do not exist. It's popular culture that says they do.