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Seti@Home Now Has Teams

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the truth-is-out-there dept.

Madoc writes "Was just over at Seti@Home's site, and saw that they've introduced teams now! There are 2 Slashdot teams, we should probably standardize on one: Slashdot.org and Team Slashdot " I vote for Team Slashdot. Go seek out new intelligence if this rocks your boat better than cracking DES keys.

3 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Usefulness by asmussen · · Score: 5

    Sure, but I think that the rc5 project has already proven it's point. Even if we do finally finish rc64, all we will have proven is that it is crackable, but that it takes even distributed computing a really long time with today's technology, but I think that this point has already been adequately proven already by distributed.net. If they do finally crack the rc64 challenge, I don't really think it will add to that point at all. I think that it is already understood now that it can be cracked, and that the average time it would take to do so is really just a fairly simple mathematical exercise complicated only by unknowns like the increase in processing power from year to year, and how many people participate as time goes on. Actually doing it at this point holds little more point than the prize money in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, I think this was a vital project when it began, I just think that it accomplished what it needed to do, that's all. Now if they ever get their OGR stuff going, I might be tempted to switch back to work on that for a while, but for now I'm sticking with SETI.

    --
    Shawn Asmussen
  2. A better forum for SETI(@home) discussion by Kris_J · · Score: 5
    Rather than posting your SETI@home stuff here, you should join the SETI Club @ Yahoo. We've got 370 members already and discussion about the SETI@home clients and heap of other SETI stuff is going on as you read this.

    We've also got a Team on SETI@home. You can find out info about it, along with tips on optimising your SETI@home client software on the Club Team homepage.

    Enjoy,
    Kris.

    Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)

  3. Re:Maybe I'm parnanoid? No source? by Mr+Debug · · Score: 5
    I guess you are right - in theory we can't really tell what anyone is up to. For all I know it could be using all the CPU time to search for intelligent life in /etc/passwd and /home/secrets then the rest of it to wrap it up in very strong encryption :-)

    But the nice thing about Linux is that you can bolt the program down so tightly (separate user, chroot) so that it cannot do any damage - it'll never find my pornography or any of my other dirty secrets ;-) (hmm, me reaches for the man chroot command anyway)

    Having said that I think it's not really feasible for these guys to give out the source code, because it allows malicious people to write something that'll send fake packets back saying "okay - I've found nothing". This would be a grossly irresponsible thing to do but I wouldn't rule out a cheat who would want to bump up the team's "block count" up a little or religious fanatics whose beliefs depend on there being nothing out there. Security through obscurity, perhaps, but I can't think of any other way of protecting against cheats.*

    Despite that I'm still a little irked off about it myself as I'm forced to sit behind a non-transparent proxy and twiddle my thumbs with a cluster of about ~16 decent machines that are just itching to join in the search for extraterrestrial life. If only I had the source I could have written that proxy bit myself already!

    *By the way it's probably only a matter of time before someone actually reverse engineers the program. Security through obscurity has always ended in tears.