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SETI@home having Problems
Foxman writes "Due to
failures in coping with the overwhelming response from
volunteers, the SETI@home project has been erroneously
sending the same packets of radio data to its 500,000 participants."
The scariest comment is the estimate that SETI@Home is using
8 tons of fossil fuel per hour.
All potential alien life WILL be far more advanced than us. Consider that we have only been putting radio waves out in to space for a hundred years or so. Do some quick math and realize that those radio waves are not even to another star yet.
Now think the other way. If radio waves are reaching us from another planet, they were emittted a very long time ago. Ahhh.. That means the aliens were around long before us and are much more advanced.
And consider that radio is a shitty way to communicate and everything on Earth is moving more and more to cables or spread spectrum or other hard to detect transmission means and you will realize that there is only a feww hundred yyears of radio waves that will be easily detected. How many aliens will pick up on those? And what sort of technology will we have when they do?
FUD?
I'm not calling possible alien technology obviously more advanced. I'm saying it's most likely, well, alien.
But light is light, and radio waves are radio waves. Their alien origin is irrelevent.
Judging by the weakness of the excuses offered up by the fine folks at SETI@home, I am led to conclude that there must be darker, more sinister forces at work here; I suggest that important, perhaps earth-shattering evidence of some kind must have been discovered in the early data sets, and the rest of the data is being withheld while the SETI community (at the urging of the MIB and other secret government agencies, no doubt) scrambles to alter the remaining data or otherwise prevent the general public from becoming aware of the situation. Noting some recent /. headlines and the "coincidental" disparaging remarks in the SETI@home press release regarding hackers and the hacker mentality, it seems clear that alien transmissions must have been discovered to contain detailed instructions for the construction of a cold fusion device.
:P
"Paranoia? No such thing, it's all a conspiracy by the mental health profession."
That SETI@Home has been Slashdotted and is having a little touble scaling is unfortunate, but understandable. They just need some time to fix the problems that the massive reponse they got dragged to light, No big deal.
But I find the fact that people are trying to exploit loopholes and bugs in the the client to be sickening, even revolting. Come on guys, SETI@Home is worthy science and a chance to demonstrate to the world how good and powerful we are when we co-operate, Can't you find some other place to vandalize?
Is nothing sacred?
Netrek does that, for the most part. They distribute the source to all the clients, but most servers will only accept a "blessed" binary. A blessed binary is one that was personaly compiled by one of the coding gods. They used to verify it by sticking an extra .c file in just for that purpose, which was not distributed. Now, however, they use RSA keys. Methinks that once you have that done, signing the results should be trivial.
I personally alwayss thought the SETI project was a little far fetched anyways. I'd rather spend my CPU time with distributed.net hoping to change stupid laws. The odds are a lot better, anyways (: Of course everyone should run what they want; but why not give SETI some time to settle down, work all the bugs out, and apologize for calling *nix users cheaters (:
A signed binary buys you a degree of assurance that the binary is what you think it is. It is useful for the person installing the binary on their machine.
A signed binary does not buy others confidence in the results of the binary -- they can see neither the binary itself nor its signature. This is a general problem in distributed computing, SETI@Home is just an interesting case.
My understanding of digital signatures (the probable solution, IMO) is that they rely on a secret maintained by a user, where the integrity of the secret can be trusted. With a binary, you have an object which may be accessed by several users, and either the object or the user may be trying to hoodwink you. What would be required is some way to at least verify that the the binary itself is what it purports to be. I see a challenge-response of some sort on data transfer as the only real way for this to happen, however the mechanism would have to rely on something not apparent in either the source code or the binary itself.
Possibly a twist on public key encryption, where the compilation host generates a key pair for each binary (or for a collective set of binaries), in which one portion of the key is coded into the binary and its pair is retained by a trusted host. This would allow for public distribution of code, however production results would have to come from a binary compiled on a known trusted host.
I'm talking through my hat and making this up as I go. The idea sounds intriguing however.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
If you're still listening....
Do you have more info on just how this happens? The FAQ and webpages at Netrek don't really get into details. Sounds like it's up my alley though.
Respond via email (unmunge address).
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I was reading with some interest the notes at SETI@Home discussing why an open source client wasn't being distributed. Apparently there are concerns with what would happen if an OSS client were hacked to provide wrong answers. I have two key thoughts.
First, closing the source apparently isn't preventing exploits based on the existing client. Whether or not anyone's tried to reverse engineer the code or not I'm not sure, but it's probably a matter of time before an RE or exploit-capable client is produced.
Second, this problem is something which OSS must face in general, particularly in a distributed computing environment. While digital signatures can be used to validate individuals and email, I'm wondering if similar means can be used to verify a program and its results. What SETI@Home needs is a way to distribute its source (to get benefits of OSS development), but to be able to mark the "canonized" version of the code in such a way that a non-forgeable signature can be attached to results and not just the code.
I'd be interested in knowing how or whether this issue is being persued elsewhere.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
The closest star is far less than 100 LY away
So? Since when do radio waves travel at the speed of light?
They're completely un-responsive, having not updated their news since the project began.
You have not been paying close attention. They've been changing the status items (the bulleted list) on their web page about every other day. I also sent them a note about the non-standard port on a proxy issue, and while I didn't get a personal response, the problem made it into the 'known bugs' list 24 hours later.
If you analyze the page a little, you'll see that the entire operation is being run by 4 guys, reportedly on a part-time basis. Give them a little slack.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Joining distributed.net made me feel like I was joining a team, joining Seti@home makes me feel like a tool.
You must have joined a different distributed.net than the one I dropped out of. Or did you miss the day-after-day blasts on the mailing list about how uncommunicative Nugget and the other founders were? Granted, that was a year or more ago, and things might have changed. But, these two progjects are more alike than you might think.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Could they at least provide an simple option NOT to draw pretty pictures, making it v1.01 in the next day?
Why, when it's already in version 1.0?
From the web site:
If you want your PC to analyze data as efficiently as possible, you can have your screen blanked (no graphics) after a given period. To do this, go to the Display Properties control panel, the Screen Saver tab, select SETI@home, click Settings, and check the "Go to blank screen" box.
Now I don't think these instructions have been on the website since day one, but the option has been there all along. There were a lot of messages floating around discussing it. Didn't you look in the client and say 'Gee, I wonder what this does?' If not, what's more the shame, that the Seti@home programmers aren't up to your high standards, or that you're not capable of doing a little independent investigation of software you're installing on your machine?
Nevermind that stupid URL at their site, why on Earth they needed SSL in it? seti.berkeley.edu could do fine.
I'm sorry to hear how Berekley sets up their network doesn't meet with your approval. I'm sure they can use a network consultant of your caliber. I presume you're going to jet right over there and set them up correctly.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Not all RF is used for communications. Radar utilizes very concentrated, very high-power beams that could be detected at much larger distances than communications RF.
And considering that the star Alpha Centuri is 4 light years away, we have a pretty good idea about your grasp of science.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Posted by frogbert:
Anderson said some groups are claiming credit for processing the same data packet over and over..
WELL DUH
I do hope, Prof Anderson will publicly appologise
for his words. Basically, equivalent of his words
in the "Real word" would be:
(Prof Anderson commes to classroom)
"I am sorry that I couldn't make it to a class yeterday. Someone has robbed me on the street, while I was walking alone, trough one of the worse slums in the whole USA at 2:30 in the morning, so I had to spend the whole morning at the Police station - first they were waiting me to get sober, then I had to describe the man...
And, I don't want to name names, but
it's fair to say the blacks have caused all this trouble. It seems to be the neger mentality."
I don't want to name names," he said, "But
it's fair to say the blacks
are causing most of the headaches. It
seems to be the neger mentality."
Now, I just wonder how long could he stay a professor with such an attitude?
Yust for the case he does not come with a public appologies, I think we should organise a strike.
(A very public strike)
Yours
Denis
Your science is woeful, but amazingly, your hypothesis is probably correct.
RF travels at about the speed of light. It's sound that travels much slower (and not at all, through a vacuum like deep space).
Odds are, though, any alien race we encounter will be far more advanced than us. Why? Because we have been transmitting significant RF signals for less than 100 years of our planet's 5 billion year history. Assuming advanced civs aren't inherently unstable, we should be transmitting RF for many thousands, millions, or even billions of years to come, and advancing technologically all along the way. Persumably other alien civilizations would develop similarly. The odds, then, that we would receive a signal from exactly that tiny window of time when their civilization is near the same point of development as ours seems pretty darned small.
It's possible, of course, that for various reasons technological advances tend to slow beyond a certain point. (Perhaps once a civ gets "holosuites" and "replicators", technological advancement slows.) Or it may be that civs only generate significant enough RF emissions to be detected from other stars for a very brief time, so we would miss the even more advanced civs due to their radio silence. In that case or for other reasons, it might be more likely that the only civs we could hear were (at the time of transmission) at a similar level of technological development.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
My machine has been pumping in results all week but my totals haven't been going up. Also if you add up the number of results sent in for every one in a group it doesn't seem to match the result for that group.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Duh...
Visible light and radio waves are both electromagnetic radiation. They both travel at the speed of light.
- Ken
"And read more Sagan."
Always good advice. I read "Billion and Billions" a while back and I though it was so good that I recently read "Contact", "Cosmos", "Broca's Brain", and am now on "The Demon-Haunted World". It's very interesting stuff, even though he sometimes loses me on the physics(still in HS and haven't taken Physics yet).
I realize your arguements have merit, but we really just have to assume(hope) that
1) there are a bunch of civilizations out there
2) since whatever they do, fundamental laws of science should be the same, they would have radio
Now we are making some assumptions, but don't we have to try? Would it be better to just forget about looking for ET life? The thing is, even though the chances are low(or maybe not low, we can't be sure), the gains from even finding life somewhere like Mars would be enormous, the gains from being able to contact an intelligent ET lifeform would very possibly be the biggest event in human history. What if there was some lifeform trasmitting out vast amounts of knowledge so we picked up something like a big reference book. Who knows how many years it would advance human science? Tens? Doubtful. Hundreds? More likely. Over one thousand? Definitely possible.
To not conduct this search would be doing a disservice to the human race.
"It's a pretty safe bet that your Powerbook won't be able to uplink with the mothership."
I don't know, Jeff Goldblum was even able to write a virus, imagine that. It seems that aliens use the MacOS.
"Since when do radio waves travel at the speed of light?"
Oh boy. Well suffice it to say they've been traveling that fast for a while and hopefully will continue to do so.
Nope, it's not just you. Here's the snippet of text that Fizgig is referring to. (In case some of you missed the second page of the article.)
Anderson said that at least two of the top 10 work groups have only reached the rankings because some of the members had cheated.
"I don't want to name names," he said, "But it's fair to say the Unix and Linux crowds are causing most of the headaches. It seems to be the hacker mentality."
-Derek
Biggest problem I have with this group is that they're yet another Distributed-type project. It would be nice if we could have some sort of concerted effort on one distributed project before we spawn another. Distributed.net has a lot of experience with this sort of thing, and so they've got the infrastructure to handle it. We're spawning ANOTHER group, and they're reinventing the wheel as far as the organization, the client, etc. (Although, I admit, the screen saver IS pretty -- and I'm tempted to run SETI@Home on my home PC alng with the Distributed.net client.)
For now, I just run SETI@Home at work, where I don't want to explain (or even have a possibility of having to explain) "Code cracking" on my work computer.
You know how I feel about it!
and I'll quit and join distributed.net - where they don't blame Linux users for their problems.
and where we are slowly catching up!
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
To me, the "hacker mentality" is to look at something, figure out how it works, and see how it might be adapted to other purposes. Anything that relies on "security through obscurity" is a prime target, and the Seti folks should have realized this.
IMHO, distributed computing will ultimately have to rely on open protocols and software. It seems to me that redundancy is probably the easiest way to validate data; send the same block to 2 or more randomly-selected clients around the world, and compare the results (ideally, there would be some sort of checksum returned rather than just a Yes/No result). I would also think that participants could "earn" trust over time if their blocks were always legitimate. I know it's nowhere near as simple as this in the real world, but I think this is the direction in which people should be heading.
BTW, I downloaded their client for Linux/x86 but it wouldn't talk through my SOCKS5 proxy server. My other computer is a Netwinder, and I didn't see a Linux/ARM client there. And I don't have anywhere *near* enough free time to try to spoof their servers, so I've abandoned the whole project.
I thought that the reason that Windows clients were not cheating was due to the fact the the Windows client did NOT have the bug in it that caused it to do a WU ever 5-10 minutes. From the article - Anderson said that at least two of the top 10 work groups have only reached the rankings because some of the members had cheated. "I don't want to name names," he said, "But it's fair to say the Unix and Linux crowds are causing most of the headaches. It seems to be the hacker mentality."
Not to mention they have no respect for the people putting their CPU cycles into this. They close up their software totally, cut off all communication. I'm sure they had good intentions, but they did it to themselves. Many people in the free software community were willing to help with developing clients, but they basically ignored them; now they're using a shortage of manpower as an excuse. I do not consider these people a part of the scientific community, and from what I understand, neither do many scientists.
The fact that they had a little hiccup and started sendind duplicate packets does not bother me in the least. As you said this is a new program and no program of this scale ever ran right the first time. What chaffes my arse, is the fact that say that they are having problems from the *nix community, I.E.
"I don't want to name names," he said,
"But it's fair to say the Unix and Linux
crowds are causing most of the
headaches. It seems to be the hacker
mentality
It does not say that the problems are coming from members in the *nix community, but that it's from the *nix crowds...Blaming us.
1. I volunteered to help, yes. But I'll not stand here and have it said that me and my community are to blame. I give blood, the fact that there has been tainted blood found, make me responsible? Not likely.
2. I "complain", as you put it, so my concerns can be heard by the SETI staff and the world in general. I hope that by voicing my concerns, change can be made.
3. Are we spoofing the results? Or is it a case of the *nix platforms just better at the task than expected?
After all look at these two points. *Nix doesn't have the overhead that Windows9x/NT have. Also, there is no screen saver for *nix, so the machine is not using idle process for drawing. I.E., more idle process for *nix.
They asked for help, we offered help, we got slapped. I guess that this proves the old saying "No good deed goes unpunished"
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Ok, They (whoever they are) probally use more advanced technology for communications. But remember when we get a blip from a star 300Ly away, we are getting the blip as it was 300 years ago. If an advanced race was sitting, Oh...about 40Ly away, they would probally hear good old 50's rock and roll on amplitude modulation. Sure! We're using microwave to satelites and whatever, but that's what they would be hearing.
Whatever advancements they may or may not have, odds are they used radio at some time. After all, look at how we discovered the concept of carrier wave RF signals
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Why must we keep killing all these webservers? Can't we all just get along?
I have to return some videotapes...
Section 3.11 of their FAQ states that if they don't have enough data then multiple users will receive the same data.
If their servers are being overwhelmed(as their site indicates) then it's entirely possible that they didn't have enough data online to send to all the clients.
as it's only using the idle time of the computer. I have SETI running at home(the new OS/2 client) and work, but the computers are only on when I'm using them, thus no extra fuel is being used.
they are instead running some variation of Windows:-) As such, they don't gain the power benefits of the CPU's idle state.
off-topic: battery life on laptops is one place that OS/2 and Linux really shine at :-)
I think they're referring to 'cheating' in the sense of 'team slashdot' utilizing the slashdot effect to gain the lead. They shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, is what I think. They should admit "Wow! We weren't ready for that kind of response! But give us some time and we will be...". They should be grateful that this resource pool is being offered to them.
**>>BELCH
SETI@home should consider NOT posting ANY user/team related stats publicly. Situations like this, wherein one can get his or her "name in lights" INVITE DISASTER.
Seti@home probably posts these statistics in the hope of generating a spirit of competiton in order to get more people involved. Understandable but unnecessary. Let those who wish to contribute do so for their own reasons. Your pool of players may shrink considerably, but the quality of the players will rise dramatically.
Remove the "game" aspect of it and you'll rid yourselves of most of those who seek only to play games.
Post only the most fundamental overall statistics, to give contributors an overall idea of how much work is getting done.
When you believe that 'Contact' has actually been established, THEN you can say who processed the data in question, when, where and so on.
**>>BELCH
Nuclear power is still the cleanest and most reliable sorce of energy available, except for hydroelectric. But hydroelectric is for wimps. Give me cerenkov blue-glow over Hoover dam any day.
Of course, I don't subscribe to Seti@home either. After all, my processor cycles are Mine, not anyone else's. I'll use them as a darn well see fit.
From the wired article... /. effect. However, he (project director David Anderson) states in the paragraph before the one I quoted about *some* members of the teams had cheated. Then in this paragraph he makes it sound like the entire Unix/Linux userbase has a "hacker mentality" that somehow equates to a desire to cheat.
---
"I don't want to name names," he said, "But it's fair to say the Unix and Linux crowds are causing most of the headaches. It seems to be the hacker mentality."
---
"Fair to say"? Hah! I don't think that is anywhere near fair to say. Before reading this portion of the article, I had planned on posting in defense of SETI@home, it seems basically they suffered from a massive
I certainly will discontinue running the client until they fix these problems so we're not all wasting our cpu cycles and even after the bugs are fixed, in light of the attitude of SETI@Home expressed through the project director, I may never run it.
I fear you totally missed the point of my comment.
I'm not denying that the cheating could've been done by Linux/Unix people. I'm saying that the vast majority of Linux/Unix did NOT cheat.
So his statement would be like me seeing one white person steal something and then saying "Well, I'm not going to name any names, but you know white people love to steal, it's the white mentality."
Another key point to my post was that the "hacking" mentality that Slashdot promotes is NOT the urge to cheat, but the urge to learn, to tinker with things, etc. This is the crux of the hacker/cracker issue, keep up with the posts on Slashdot and you'll see what I mean. Just today there was a story posted about it.
I'm also not asking that he detail exactly what happened - I don't care. Much of your post doesn't seem at all to be in reply to mine - why did you post it as a reply???
> And 8 tons of fossil fuel a day? Like all those people would have otherwise turned off their computers.
:-)
> Waiting patiently for contact,
Please keep in mind that under Real OSes (tm) idle CPU
time actually does use signifigantly less power then CPU
time used for computations, because the "noop" or "halt"
commants repeatedly given to the CPU during the idle
loops uses almost no power.
Haven't any of your overclocker friends noticed how their
CPUs run colder under Linux than Windows? Thats why.
So don't run seti@home on your laptop.
Host your own websites, anywhere!
> Won't argue with you there. It isn't any wonder,
> and it does kinda-sorta invalidate some of the
> utopian "we can all work together" propaganda.
No argument there. Anyone who thinks that people won't be real jerks at least some of the time (even where there is considerable counterincentive) need to get in better touch with reality.
> The people promoting stuff like this are
> shineing a really bright light on the whole OSS
> concept.
Are they? Last time I checked, SETI@Home certainly was not OSS, and their decsision to avoid OSS doesn't appear to have helped them significantly either.
You can maybe say something about shining a really bright light on the inherent good of mankind concept, but this is neiter a vindication nor an indictment of OSS specifically. OSS depends on the same kinds of you-scratch-my-back-i'll-scratch-yours economic exchanges we're used to, just as much as it does on altrusim.
[ n.b. economic != monetary ]
Very few people would do OSS if they couldn't realisitically expect to get something back, and that's usually more than just a clean conscience. However, neither is it World Domination...
> One world, one nation, one GNU. er... let me
> rephrase that....
Godwin's law, you lose.
---
DNA just wants to be free...
I tried the mersenne client for a while but I wasn't happy with it. My cpu was only at around 30-50% usage compared to 100% on rc5. That's too bad because I liked the idea ($50,000 helps too :)
---
it's not like anyone is going to find ET anyway (unless you think that there's some serious reason for thinking the x-files is real). I mean...Star Wars and Star Trek are lots of fun but let's get back to the real world and find some intelligence on _this_ planet? Thank you
---
Man that article paints a pretty dim picture of the whiny Seti@Home client user.
It is obvious that some people's results are spoofed
90) zenosin 437 426 115 hr 01 min 03.0 sec 0 hr 16 min 12.0 sec
considering A) the client is not multithreaded and B)I read one team page who was touting their fastest machine, an Alpha 21264 running at 600MHz, running Linux would finish a block in 4 hours. This is a case of bad spoofing, good spoofing would simply cache the results and resubmit so that the CPU time would be less obviously wrong.
It is simple to say where the spoofed results are coming from, so the guy pointed it out. I use many of the different clients(including a couple of linux clients), and I would have to say that I am certaintly not offended, but I do find the spoofing, cracking and especially whining most offensive!
Very well. I must hurry back to my comic book store, where I dispense the insults rather than absorb them.
However, I think they should smile more often, nothing is irrepairable. The only thing lost in things like this are tolerance, which i didn't know had a limit or capacity to begin with...
Lastly I still don't see why they don't OSS their project, something like this should be open, all of science should be open! I'm tired of privacy of informative information. I'll eventually find out what your hiding, but in the end you've made me waste hours of searching and digging to find the abstracted hints!
Keep'n it real,
Malachi
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
That's just it. They apparently started sending the same data to everyone because they didn't have enough resources to store and process the returned data. Basicly, they put it into an idle loop until they could get the resources they need.
The other option would be to tell everyone to stop and they would lose much of the momentum they had.
Yes, the lack of communication sucks. But these people are bigger nerds than we are (trust me!), and communication skills aren't their forte.
jf
PS.. BTW I'm sure all the data is interesting to them...
The article starts out implying that due to the some kind of bug, all the effort so far as been wasted. THEN it states later that the SETI people have been trying to get it to scale to 500,000+ systems (which is 3x the origional number expected) and have been sending out the same information to everyone for testing and sanity checks.
Why all the negative vibes because of this? People volunteer and then get mad because SETI stopped to try to get the system to scale?
It's very hard to do testing on something like this. How could you stress test a new distributed system with 500,000 nodes beforehand? You probably can't.
Distributed.net had to start over a couple of times due to programming errors. Granted, the communication about this could have been better, but do they HAVE to tell you that they are in a test mode? Cut the ET watchers some slack.
On another note, does anyone have any information about the "Unix and Linux" uses that are 'cheating'? If you know anyone doing that, SLAP THEM HARD!
First Carmack getting mailbomed, now this. Some people on the Internet are REALLY starting to suck...
jf
SETI is an extremely long term project
grow up....if you didn't cheat, then you shouldn't take offence.
Do you feel guilty? Is there something we should know about?
I doubt it. I don't see how the Unix comment could have been taken out of context. I was running the SETI client on 4 boxes, but their down now, and I don't plan to bring them back up. I'm not going to give them my help if they don't want it. Someone insults you and you defend them and then continue to further their cause, SETI@HOME will just have to search for extraterrestrial life without my extra cycles.
-- Hawk
I came. I saw. I coded.
"I don't want to name names," he said, "But it's fair to say the Unix and Linux crowds are causing most of the headaches. It seems to be the hacker mentality."
Well that's pretty thinly veiled.
Whatever- get it together before you launch such an ambitious project.
The linux and mac boxes I have working on it have been chugging along (45 units returned) for a couple weeks, that sucks if they're just chewing on redundant data.
I note that the Wired article says they've put most of their computing power into webservers to handle the demands of people downloading the software and not enough into data block allocations.
Have they ever heard of mirroring? They do host the main download site at ftp.cdrom.com, but the other 4 or so sites are all their own. Why not just ask for support from some of the main FTP sites around the world and have them serve everything except the blocks?
Ow, that's low. We're getting our place by cheating?
Now let's see... I've noticed that on my dual-boot machine, the Seti@home client runs about twice as fast under Linux than under Windows 98. (Maybe it's the pretty graphics.) This is clearly going to give Unix users a hand.
Second, uh, the Slashdot effect. I suspect Unix/Linux types are disproportionately represented among Seti@home users, more sci/tech enthusiasts or something.
Unix/Linux implies hacker (read: cracker) mentality? Yeah, it's a good thing that there is no such thing as a Windows hAXX0r d00d. (sarcasm)
Do you really expect the SETI@Home folks to kiss *your* very personal butt, just because you contributed a few cpu cycles and were even thinking of throwing in your mighty RS6000?
Hardly. What I meant to communicate was that if one's project depends on the good will of volunteers, going out of your way to offend those volunteers is counterproductive. Moreover, it's not very nice, which is the worst part of it. I know that being nice is not considered important in some quarters, and that some people confuse it with butt kissing, but it matters to me. That's all.
What offends me, or more accurately, bothers me about Anderson's remarks is that:
SETI@Home is a volunteer project relying on essentially personal motivations to encourage participation. I personally didn't care for what Anderson said, I told him so, and it is possible that I will cease to participate because of it. I offer my opinion as a personal opinion, not a recommendation that others think or do likewise.
Did it ever occur to you that the statement might have been meant in a positive way, as in "while it's been mostly the Unix/Linux crowd, it's not because they're all criminals, but rather because of the hacking spirit"?
That strikes me as highly unlikely given the rest of the things he said. If a retraction or clarification appears, I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
If you don't like the project, get out. If you like it, stay in.
But shut up either way, right? No thanks.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
To SETI@Home project manager David Anderson:
I am not concerned with the recent technical problems with SETI@Home. While the decision to continue accepting new clients before the system was ready for the load demonstrated dubious judgment, problems of this sort are to be expected with a large distributed project during the early stages.
What was not expected was the poor judgment to make the following statement, among others, to _Wired_:
>"I don't want to name names," he said,
>"But it's fair to say the Unix and Linux
>crowds are causing most of the
>headaches. It seems to be the hacker
>mentality."
I have the SETI@Home client running on eight or nine workstations at present, some of which are Linux boxes. I was about to take three backup servers that are currently idle -- an IBM RS6000, a Compaq Proliant, and an IBM PC Server, all of which are running one flavor of Unix or another -- and devote them wholly to SETI@Home until such time as they are needed for other purposes. I thought it would be a nice project for my "hacker mentality". That plan is no longer on the burner. I don't know if I will go as far as many Unix admins already have and take the trouble to pull SETI@Home off the machines it's already running on, but I'm giving it some thought. It certainly won't be going on any new servers. You guys clearly don't want any of us hackers burning CPU time for you.
The next time you have problems with a few individuals, you might want to address them directly, rather than the largely innocent and devoted demographic to which they belong. If you have problems with a businessman who happens to be Jewish, you would not launch a polemic against Jews as a class, would you? Yet, faced with a few problematic vandals who happen to use Unix and style themselves "hackers", you denounce law-abiding, honest Unix hackers as a class. That was stupid and indecent. Shame on you.
If we do someday manage to achieve contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, it is my devout hope that their first impression of humanity does not come from the likes of you.
--Eric O'Dell
Director of Information Services,
The Gadget Guru, LLC
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
That they are having problems is understandable for a new project struggling to scale to unanticipated load levels, and it doesn't bother me at all. I wasn't using those CPU cycles for anything else anyway, and I think SETI@Home is a great idea -- certainly more important in the broad scheme of things than the encryption projects run by distributed.net, which are merely political rather than cosmic in scope.
On the other hand, their wholesale slam against the Unix/Linux crowd on the basis of what are probably a tiny percentage of idiots was just plain stupid. I won't end my participation in the project because of it, but I'm insulted enough that the next time they screw up I'll give it some serious thought. It's precisely because of my hacker mentality that I'm participating in the first place.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
500,000 simultanious connections as extreme as 150,000. I am not sure they actually tested it against the latter number. In fact, given that fact that they claimed to have 35Gb a day of work-units (and 350kb per unit send), we have
35,000,000/350 = 100,000 users per day. So, given the fact that they expected at least 150,000 they would max out rather soon. Bad planning.
Now, pardon my mood, but I am completely pissed off the fact, they released extremely slow Win client, while according to their own statistics Pentium/Windows platform leads by at least 5-8 times. Excuse me, but if they had a bit of brains they would optimise first WINDOWS client, no matter how they hate it. Could they at least provide an simple option NOT to draw pretty pictures, making it v1.01 in the next day? It is shame that Berkeley has got associated with such a poor programming. You might hate windows, but you should not be a fool and ignore thousands of people who dedicated their Win boxes, we feel like being treated as 3rd class users!
Nevermind that stupid URL at their site, why on Earth they needed SSL in it? seti.berkeley.edu could do fine.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
Well, it's using some extra. Since I started running this, I haven't shut off my machine. It used to only run maybe 12 hours a day. Same with a couple of machines at work (all Windows machines; I don't shut off my Linux boxes). I bet others have been doing the same.
I'll take that bet...
Their basic premisse is that Look at all the ways you use radio transmissions (...) On earth, we've already decided on the most efficient method! ( seti)
Excuse me, we have decided? Dinosaurs roamed the earth 65 million years ago, and we have used radio transmissions now for only slightly more than a hundred years. What if we find something better than radio signals in say a hundred, a thousand, or even a hundred thousand years.
These people have zero respect for time. These people are not scientists.
If you had read the information on the SETI@Home website, you would understand the reasons for not making this an open source application. They specifically addressed this.
Releasing the source code would provide ample opportunity to the same kind of idiots who do mail bombs, hijack ratings, and generally screw a good thing up. Arguing that it would be more good than bad is crazy : They have working clients for many platforms right now, and that seems fine to me. What good would open source do? Open source is good stuff, but it's NOT the solution for everything!
----------
"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
My assertian is not that they would obviously be more advanced.
My assertion is that technology builds upon itself.
Having started from a different point, how can you assume that another culture would reach the same conclusions?
Leaps in technological complexity occur when a culture learns to do something it previously didn't know it was ignorant of.
Human science has suffered various huge setbacks.
Hydrolic technology was cut off at the knees when it was decided that it was far better to employ hundreds of manual laborers to open the temple doors than to build an experimental device using sand.
The library at Alexandria was burned. We don't know what we lost.
It took spanish missionaries 14 years to destroy all the collected writings of the maya. We don't know what we lost. Their religion, their science, their literature, their poetry. All gone. Just because they weren't christians. (OK, they say they were performing human sacrifice too, but that's still no reason to erase their history)
Alchemists were so feared and loathed that they obscured their writings so much we're not sure what most of them were doing. A lot of them thought they could spontaniously generate mice by leaving a box with a sweatty shirt and some wheat in a field, but they can't all be wrong.
Millions of people in third world countries die of gastric disorders because they still believe the popular teachings of an early medic who said the best way to deal with a leaky bottom is to avoid liquids.
Furthermore, many of the important technological advancements of the last few hundreds of years have been purely accidental.
If you don't believe me, research the history of polymer plastics. Read about how the search for artificial crop fertilization revolutionized explosives. Read about the discovery of the diode.
A lot of important things came to be because of someone who was looking for one thing and stumbled on another.
A few years ago a japanese college student who was bad at math used 1000 times as much catalyst as he was supposed to and stumbled upon a polymer that conducts electricity and can hold a charge. How often does this kind of thing happen?
Who would have figured that an inordinately difficult method of printing (lithography) would allow the miniturization of transistors?
Why would you assume that a completely foreign history would advance the same technologies?
Maybe when they find us, they'll be utterly enthralled by jello.
Given the fact that human technology has advanced more in the last 100 years than all previous recorded history, it's assumed mathematically that an alien culture is more likely to be well ahead or well behind of us. We spent thousands of years dicking around and then lept into this era with a vengance.
What if Babbages machine was built and functioned within his lifetime? the british government poured millions of pounds into trying to build it, but the metalurgical technology wasn't up to it. We might have entered the information age much earlier.
How can you assume that human understanding of physics encompasses all of reality? We don't make the rules you know, we just try to understand them.
I'm not calling possible alien technology obviously more advanced. I'm saying it's most likely, well, alien.
It's a pretty safe bet that your Powerbook won't be able to uplink with the mothership.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
"I've sent three requests for help for a problem with using a solaris client behind a standard firewall, and haven't recieved a single response."
If you'd read their page you'd see:
We're a bit overwhelmed with emails and bug reports, and won't be able to respond to them
individually.
We're still probably talking about less power than it takes to keep the porch light on.
Edu. sig-line: Choose rhymes with lose. Chose rhymes with goes. Loose rhymes with goose.
Comparing? THEN use THAN.
I understand everyone is upset over what the director of seti@home has said. I'm sure he's getting flamed from many sides and I'm suspecting is going to be appologizing to the volunteers shortly. I wonder if the wired people might want to link back to this thread to see the reaction from thier article. I'm disapointed I've been doing the same blocks as other people, but it does let me take it off one of the computers here without 'loosing' a block. :)
If your going to give away cycles - they're gone don't be upset they were 'wasted'. Nearly all blocks are meaningless anyway. I'm still looking for the needle, its up to everyone to decide what they want to do.
Right now, Seti@home seems to be going through a lot of the same growing pains that Distributed.net went throught a couple years ago. Distributed.net hasn't had problems with issuing duplicate keyblocks, but we have had the problems with stats, bandwidth, and many other issues. Its a shame seti refused the Distributed.net offer to join projects. They might be doing better now...
Ironic if you ask me. They have a large ammount of corporate backing and are having tons of problems (which started when their network of users was far smaller then the distributed.net userbase), yet distributed.net is entirely vollenteer based with very little funding and doesn't have too much trouble with bandwidth and network stability.
--
Actually, it seems like a really easy way to check for faked responses is to occaionally send data from which a known response can be expected. If they send back a fake response, send a second set of data for verification. If that is also falsified, use the client to upload a pirate copy of Office (TM/R/) 2000 and then send an anonymous email to piracy@deathbyfacistsoftware.com.
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Arecibo produces one 35 GB data tape per day. The data is cut up into 350 KB blocks to send to the SETI@home clients. 35 GB divided by 350 KB supposedly gives us 100,000 blocks per day. With 560,000 registered SETI@home clients working at an average of 40 hours per block, we can handle 336,000 blocks per day.
336,000 is greater than 100,000.
Add to that the fact that anyone who actually watches the processing can see for themselves that the blocks have all come from Jan 7 and 8. What's the statistical probability of that?
Add to that the fact that SETI itself has said on the homepage since LAST WEEK, "Our 'data pipeline' is not flowing at top speed yet, so we're sending out the same work units (mostly recorded Jan 7 and Jan 8) repeatedly. This will be fixed shortly."
Duh!
Even without the technical difficulties, the processing will outpace the input within a matter weeks. Such is the broad appeal of this project. If you guys are this upset now, I'd hate to see what you'll be like when it happens for real.
The moral of the story? Sit back, relax, boost your rankings while helping SETI to stress test the system. It's just a bloody screen saver, so your machines would have been on anyhow. Sheesh.
to blame other people for their mistakes.
;-)
It's Microsoftish.
(also, testing for bugs after the release, and they did that)
"We're having trouble and wasting everyone's CPU cycles for nothing"
would be much better than
"Unix hackers are fucking our systems".
I have used Seti@home just for a day,
(since I heard there is a slashdot team),
and I'll quit and join distributed.net - where they don't blame Linux users for their problems.
Yeah, I rather waste my cycles on something useful.
---
---
I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
People don't run their home computer all the time.
You have to remember,
Although most of the packets come from fast alphas and such, that would work all night anyway,
Most of the computers that run it are home computers,
used by people to play games and chat on IRC,
and would otherwise be turned off at night.
(or when not in use)
The people that conribute to Seti@home,
may leave their computer on for the night for that matter.
I know I did.
(Until I heard I'm wasting CPU, I thoguht I contribute to an important project)
As a proof for my claim,
you can see clearly the statistics that state that most of the clients are Windows/Intel ones,
and that almost everyone is runnig this project AT HOME.
---
---
I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
I hope at least that they're getting the same answer from each client.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
or did they allude to Slashdot as cheating? Oh well.
I don't know about that 8 tons of fuel per hour. For one thing, they gave no credentials for the guy giving the estimate--I estimate 4 tons, so there! Besides, if the people aren't using the HLT command, they're really not wasting anything (unless they're intentionally leaving their computers on longer than they otherwise would have; I don't put it past them). So they're really wasting nothing.
Good point, but still, the majority of users are using a DOS-based OS, so the estimate is off. Don't blame me! I didn't cheat! I run distributed.net!
And I don't run HLT either. It does not like a Peltier. My CPU turned green and stopped working!
Sure, more advanced life forms will probably have means of communication we can't imagine. But WE'RE emitting all kinds of detectable and clearly nonnatural signals. Who's to say they won't discover our primitive signals and respond in the same manner?
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
I don't follow your logic.
I don't get the fuss about waste.
What would your CPU do otherwise?
Wait, I know, Linux uses HLT, saving power. Too bad your hard disk, RAM and power supply are still burning up significant wattage.
Oh, wait, you would be cracking RC5 keys. Can you say boring?! Can you say, it was an interesting project the first time but it isn't any more?
Get over it. Get over the perceived slight against UNIX & Linux users, it was a general comment. I don't see how you could take it personally unless a) you are cheating, b) you have a big chip on your shoulder.
If you are cheating, shame on you! If you have a chip on your shoulder, keep in mind that this guy is probably a UNIX/Linux type of guy. They are using UNIX on their back end and they are trying to do big science on a small budget.
On the subject of publishing source. I think their concern about doing what they can to eliminate tampering is a valid one. There are various ways to deal with it, but they are obviously resource constratined. Ultimately though, they are trying to do real peer-reviewed science, so you can be sure that even if they don't publish the source, they will describe it in great deatail and provide a lot of background on how it works and why they did things the way they did.
The closest star is far less than 100 LY away. Why bother doing the math if you don't bother getting good numbers.
I said "Right On!"
1)Software is done when it is done, unless it isn't.
2)I can lock everything down really tight, that doesn't mean that people trying to break in aren't still a "headache"
3)Lets see how you deal with triple your wildest design dream on a limited budget.
4)Don't know what to tell you.
Somewhere in the low billions of years, according to best estimates.
Nice hatchet job on my post. I will not bother giving you a clue other than to say that I no more tolerate crackers who exploit the security holes they fine than I tolerate someone who tries all the doors on my house, finds an open one and then walks inside. In most states, I can kill you, nice and legal.
A lot of people are getting worked up about the tone of the SETI guy in the wired article.
Keep in mind, this article is a news *story*. Like all news storys, it is designed to try and get a reaction out of the reader. This one is clearly constructed to insite your outrage.
Well guess what, it looks like it worked you have been manipulated by the media.
I can't be sure, but I bet if you had the full text of the interview, or if you talked to the guy yourself (please, don't try, he obviously has enough to deal with) you might feel differently.
Additionally; If there are many different kinds of aliens out there, wouldn't many of them use or have used different types of communication? What're the odds that one of those alien species would be using a form of communication similar enough to our own that we can detect it using AM/FM, etc...?
You would be completely correct if there are none, or only a few alien species out there (always the distinct possibility that we're all alone. Then we'd get to make our own aliens). SETI, however, is making the assumption that there are lots, else why would they attempt to search when the odds wuld be so great against an alien species being in the same mega-cluster, much less the same quadrant of the galaxy? If there're a bunch of aliens, chances are a small but significant portion of them will have made similar enough discoveries to have detectable communication signals. After all, no matter how your technology evolves, the science behind it is fundamental to the universe itself. A quark by any other name is still 1/3 of a proton.
Correct, up to a point. Receiving electro-magnetic communication from an alien species 7,000 light-years away (for instance) is hardly encountering an alien race.
Well before they released the windows client I was having all kinds of trouble, servers timing out, the client crashing.. Then they go off prematurely releaseing the windows client, so their servers can be even more overloaded. If they are going to go around throwing blind generalizations about Linux/Unix + hackers, then screw it, they don't need my cycles.
i'll have to disagree with you here. while i didn't do any 'hacking' (i wouldn't touch seti with a 10' pole), i staunchly defend people finding holes in the code and making it very clear why they're bad, as soon as possible. much better that this stuff gets ironed out in the first few months than six years down the line when SETI is (might be) much bigger and more serious.. now it does considerably less damage. IIRC, d.net had the same problem early on, but hasn't had it since.
just my 2 cents. flame away.
--neil
Apparantly some of you "deep thinkers" need to read more... preferably some stuff written by
real deep thinkers, like Carl Sagan.
For example, if you'd read the book Contact, you
wouldn't immediately assume we're only trying to
detect signals being sent accidentally by aliens.
What about the aliens that are advanced enough to
attempt "Contact" with surrounding worlds?
How would they go about doing that? Well first
off, they'd know that different civilizations
evolve differently, so to do things right, they
would build a transmitter that could broadcast on
all possible spectrums, frequencies, modulations,
and in all directions. So it would have to be big
and spherical, and very high tech. It'd also have
to be out away from the planet's atmosphere, for
the best effects. And ideally, it would not just
orbit around the homeworld, but travel through
space sending these signals.
I'd feel really special right now, if I hadn't
just stolen that entire scenario from Sagan's
book. Instead of assuming you know everything, and
that SETI is "stupid" for trying what they're
trying, you ought to open your mind...
And read more Sagan.
-WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
OK first of all, that over generalization if UNIX/Linux groups is uncalled for, but we know that. Secondly, they're writing the client and we don't have access to the source, so what's the deal, can't they just encrypt the stuff internally with a public key so people don't even know what's being sent. They have full control over this, why can't they monitor it?
Can I be pissed off that they didn't code up an X screensaver module with all the pretty eye-candy? I don't care how fast the blasted thing churns out keys (4 proc Alpha), I want a neat-o graphics hack on my root window, dammit!
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
I think we can at least draw one conclusion: that aliens would, at some point in their history, use RF signals. RF is a very direct result of the knowledge electricity and magnets. Aliens would learn of electricty because of lightning and other observable static electricity, and they would learn of magnets because magnets, exhibiting an observable property of attraction, are abundant and interesting.
In fact, former civilizations on Earth may have known something about RF.
Also, it seems reasonable that some alien civilizations would attempt to broadcast RF signals so they could find beings like themselves. The only flaws with SETI, assuming a sufficient number of intelligent aliens exist and that their physical state of existence is similar to our own, are that we may not be able to detect signals from a sufficient distance and that we can only scan a tiny piece of the sky at a time.
From the SETI@HOME web site:
/. the same place that derides Windows users for NOT having a hacking mentality, which states time and time again that Linux/Unix is a hacker's OS, that Windows users can't hack or that you can't hack with Windows? Should we then be surprised that when somebody is "hacked" they then blame it on members of the Linux/Unix community? Come on! Either were "hackers" or were not. We can't be "hackers" when its cool and be upset at being called "hackers" when its embarassing.
"Dr. David P. Anderson, Project Director. David is Chief Technology Officer at Tunes.com Inc. A former member of the Computer Science faculty at UC Berkeley, he has authored 65 research papers in operating systems, distributed computing, and computer graphics"
I've glanced at some of those 65 papers and a great deal of them have to do with operating systems, distibuted computing and secure computing. IMHO if Dr. Anderson says the Linux/Unix crowd has done the "hacking" and is responsible for his headaches, I tend to beleive him.
And why not? Isn't
As for his aloofness about who is doing it and exactly what "it" is - I find it perfectly understandable. He's already been hacked/cracked. Telling people exactly what happend may invite others to try. Identifying specifically the pereps may have 2 unwanted effects:
1. A costly lawsuit for defamation or slander. I understand you guys dow there in the US sue people a lot. Seti@home has very little money for this kind of thing
2. The worst - the "hackers" launch a more vicious, destructive attack and destroy the whole project in some bizarre Cyberware, akin to what the FBI is going through right now.
In either case, the project ends. I suspect Dr. Anderson thinks this is too important a project to risk that. So he minimizes and acts aloof...
Perhaps a group of us here could do some "hacking" in DEFENSE of SETI@home instead of against it..."hacking" might even get it's good name back! (remember script kiddies, just because I 'can' cheat or f**k with a system, doesn't mean I 'should' or will. Everyone thinks 'hackers' are evil because a few bozos did some stupid destructive things - a few bad apples blah,blah,blah...)
Maybe the sending out of the same data packets is the result of a "hack" not a bug. Something to think about.
I for one will still support the project, since my conscience is clear...
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
...instead of just calling me names (as the poster below seems to have done)?
/.ers don't seem to like to be on the recieving end of the same treatment they often dish out (and I've been on /. a long time, I see it daily). Again this was just an observation, not a judgment.
Well I'm glad I irked some response. This seems to have touched a nerve.
First off I never said it was RIGHT. I simply asked how it feels. My point was people are upset because of what Dr. Anderson said, yet don't seem to be very upset when they act like him when it comes to people who use Windows (through choice or circumstances at work) I was certainly not saying ANYBODY should be treated like this. This was more of an ironic observation that
Secondly, I stand by the fact that, through the logic of my arguement, his statement is factual. Should they have fixed the Unix client a long time ago? Sure they should have. But they are an all volunteer force and very few in numbers, so at times it can be hard to do all this and keep up with the regular job. If you are so concerned about the quality of the software, why didn't you volunteer a year ago when they asked for people? If you know how to fix the bug why don't you e-mail Dr. Anderson with a solution? Just because I see the door to a store opened at midnight, doesn't mean I should be allowed to walk in and do what I want.
My crack about Windows users not having the mentality is SARCASM! Look it up in a dictionary sometime. You seem to want it both ways - when it suits you, Windows users are idiots who can't type or even use a command line. Also when it makes you look not quite so bad, Windows users are brilliant hackers who seem to have just missed this one.
When he stated that the majority of his headaches came from the Unix/Linux community, I read it just as it is - a small group of people who happen to belong to the Unix/Linux community are causeing all his problems. I didn't see the word "all" in front of Unix/Linux community. Your answer to this never really addressed this. Read it again. If Dr. Anderson has 10 problems, 9 of which are occurring only in the Unix/Linux clients and those 9 problems are causing the system to work improperly or reflect erroneous data is it not fair for him to say that the majority of HIS headaches are caused by members (not ALL members, just members) of the Unix/Linux community, especially when that erroneous data requires purposeful action on behalf of the individuals to create (they have to find the bug and then exploit it)? Given what we know about this problem, what part of this statement is false?
You also seem to be taking Wired as gospel. Do you have the entire transcript of the interview this was based on? Do you know the total context in which this statement was made? Maybe you should feel a little angry at the Wired article for not giving a balanced opinion or sharing both sides of the story.
I think the biggest mistake SETI@HOME did was post the names of the groups and individuals and make it a "competition". Maybe if the get rid of that feature, some of these script kiddies will have no reason to try and send the same results back to the server 5000+ times.
As for generalizing the Slashdot community, as a long time member of that community I would like you to point out in my post where I did that. I beleive I was very specific about the few immature individuals who are doing this.
Does any of this make the project any less interesting or not worthy of support? I don't think so. This is a tempest in a teapot. After all, its a screen saver. If you are so insulted by the truth that you don't want to volunteer - don't. It sounds like with 3.5 x more response than they expected and more people trying to download every day, you won't be missed much.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
And this has what to do with the argument I made in my previous post?
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
But what if its true? /.er generalizing about Windows users in every third line of every post about every story. How does it feel to be on the recieving end of a bigoted gernealization?
Somebody is 'hacking'/'cracking' them and chances are they use Unix/Linux. Painting ALL Unix/Linux users with that brush is unfortunate and unfair, but no more unfair than the average
Keep that in mind next time you throw a "Winbloze" or "Windows Sux" or a "point and drool" reference to Windows users in a post.
As for the accuracy of the statement well consider:
1. Most of the "headaches" come from people sending too many responses from one downloaded packet (download once, analyze the data and then upload it 5000+ times so it looks like you processed 5000+ data chunks and now your "in the lead"). This results in overloading of the servers (they aren't scalled for 500000 users remember) and running out of disk space. This software bug is causing hardware failures. SETI@home does not have the money to just buy new equipment.
2. This bug is only a bug in the Unix/Linux client, and can't be done in the Windows version. Therefore only Unix/Linux users will ever do this.
3. The bug is a loophole which is exploited by people who go looking for it and code around it - that is people with the 'hacker' mentality. My understanding is that if you don't look for it and exploit the bug, the Unix/Linux client works as expected (Windows users aren't hackers or don't want to be hackers... right?)
Therefore the majority of the "headaches" for the project come from the Unix/Linux community with the hacker mentality, correct? Isn't that what Dr. Anderson said?
Instead of being upset for some percieved insult by the head of the SETI@home project, maybe we should be upset about the fact that some bunch of idiots is screwing with the system just so they can get their names on the web site.
Maybe the person who discovered this should have done the OSS thing and done the exploit once to show it could happen then e-mailed SETI@HOME and tell them about it. But I guess it's "closed "software so it deserves everything it gets, even at the expense of good science.
Man some people here should really grow up...and learn to sign their name if they are gonna troll for responses with four letter words! Grow up chicken shit!
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
In all things there are complainers and there are doers. Here we have a project that is grand in scale. Just because someone else is doing this kind of distributed networking more efficiently has NOTHING to do with SETI's efforts. That's like saying that because the Commodore 64 was so wildly successful and efficient that all computers ought to be. Well, I would assume that all C-64's would be that efficient, but not something that does something totally different. Sure, computer hardware is essentially the same, but the way it is implimented is not.
And to say that "I will not waste computer cycles on this buggy program" is almost as laughable as the people who have gotten offended at the Unix/Linux slur. Am I not mistaken that the Linux/Unix version came out first? I don't see these folks being anti-Linux with this sort of evidence. And just what were you wasting your computer cycles on before SETI? This is like saying "I wasted my Saturday helping to search for a lost child and then I find out the parents hadn't looked hard enough for the child yet." Sure, it can be frustrating, but you volunteered, didn't you? No one meant to take advantage of you. You joined SETI because it was cool, not because you wanted reward.
I guess that some people just cannot mess up.
And about the hacking...if the hacking took place and it was verified to have been done by LINUX/UNIX then their statements are justified. Perhaps not the hacking statement, but the dig against the platform is justified. If he had said that "Widnows users seem to be the cuplprits, but that is probably because of the MS mentality" then we would have all cheered. But I guess the double-standard is ok?
In essence, I volunteered because I thought it would be the coolest thing since sliced bread. It has been. I like the screen saver. My computer is on anyway. Nothing is lost by me in any way shape or form. That I have been chewing on a duplicate packet is unfortunate, but they will fix the issue. Anyone invlolved with SETI knows that Congress has gleefully been chopping away at its budget for years and calling it a victory while they continue to pour funds into more "dubious" research. If I can help them out I will.
::sigh::
----------
Twisted Little Gnome - The Podcasting Network http://www.twistedlittlegnome.com
Then that 8 tons would be equivalent to about 2 pounds of uranium
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
You know, before I release a production version of any software, I run it though some stress testing...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I don't care that they've managed to push out the same packets over and over again. At least they get to stresstest the system real hard (they must have one hell of a load if they only expected 150k users and got 500k users).
I'm still gonna keep on working on it. I don't care about the group results or the team results. Maybe It's just me, but I'm still stuck with the image of one day (not very likely to happen) checking the result output and find a spike kind of like the spike Jodie Foster found in contact. That's the reason why I personally stick to it. The hope and dream of discovering that we are not alone.
-Spaced out Blyant.
Has anyone considered the possibility that at some stage there might be more data to process? There is more than one radio telescope in the world you know. (and it's possible to search wider bands).
(Sorry for flamebaitish tone - I'm just a bit peeved with people coming down hard on what I see as a worthy project with some teething toubles.)
This apparently happened on or before the 5th, as mentioned here:
.plan
Carmack's
But there are few details.
Graeme Devine was also bombed, he gives a little more detail:
Mailbombs suck. They can cause delays and make it hard to find the meaningful
emails from the noise. Please stop. I can't even read the language the email is
in to know what it says!
I don't remember the details, by I heard from the "grapevine" that it was done by tricking SETI@home into thinking existing users had joined a team when they hadn't. No data was fabricated, just team credit.
I think the biggest problem with the whole Seti@Home program is that I have processed about 20 packets and none of them have ever made it BACK to the server (Ever since the windows version was released) Sheesh.. At least the screen-saver has a whole bunch of crazy movin' colors.
It probably isn't too significant, but a modern processor uses less power in a "true" idle state than when it is running. Also, SETI may keep the HD from spinning down as it writes results, causing it from using power as well.
More significantly, a lot of people are leaving their computers on so they can run SETI, rather than turning them off when they aren't being used.
This would be the perfect example of a project that should be open source. Seti is a public organization, not a corporation. They shouldn't need proprietary software. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of programmers who would have been willing to develop, debug, and optimize both the servers and clients, not to mention stress testing, and the entire process could have been completed in a fraction of the time.
The algorithms in use for searching these signals shouldn't be secret, and practically everything else has been done before in one point or another, and reinventing the wheel is a pointless venture. I recall that distributed.net had been in communication with the seti@home project over a year ago for incorporating it within their client, but they never heard anything from them.
As for cheating, I was under the impression that they set up teams, so group collaboration was permitted, or so I thought. And as for the real cheaters, I presume they keep records and would be able to make corrections, or disavow those who are cheating. Who really cares about rank anyways? Its nice to know, and maybe even fun to brag about, but in the long run it makes no difference at all.
Wasted fuel? PUH LEASE. People run their computers all the time. All we've done now is replace one screen saver for another. No additional loss has taken place.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Here in the Pacific Northwest we primarily get our electrical power from hydroelectric generation. That is huge dams that ultimately are powered by Old Sol. So, we estimate that in terms of computer cycles, we're killing a few thousand salmon per hour (because of the dams).
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
There seems to be a gleeful joy in subverting the system somehow....
I think they're subverting the system quite well by themselves. Before blaming others they should really examine the way this program runs - it's certainly not governed by anything WE would call intelligence.
Personal experience: After downloading my first packet (January 7, and therefore computed thousands of times before), I've gone 97.806% through it before it abruptly stopped and started downloading a second one - now from January 8th. Guess what, the first packet was never registered as completed! Not only can't they send out correct data, but the client can't even properly process the data it gets! I realize that my case may not necessarily be typical, but it makes you wonder - what other bugs are out there?
Saying they couldn't predict how many people would be interested in this is silly considering the coolness of the original idea and the fact that most people interested in science/astronomy/alien intelligence actually have computers and are on the Net! Thinking that hundreds of thousands of people might show up would not have been a wild guess, folks!
I'm still hoping this is a short term organizational problem they're having, otherwise I might just consider switching to some of the other worthwhile distributed projects out there.
Intelligent life on planet Linux :)
Idle machines use less energy. When idle, the
processor executes the halt instruction which
saves power. This does not hold for Windows 95.
As I understand it, they process one work unit and just keep resending the results. The end result, take 9.5 hours to calculate one work unit then send it back to them 5000+ times. Thus putting yourself at the top of list.
Aparently it's easy to due with Unix clients, I don't know of a way to do it in Windows.
Ok...8 tons of FF/hour...I wonder what that figure would be for all the damn screen savers running around out here.
As for whether their tech would be more advanced...Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away...duh long ago. duh
Linux again get's some bad press.. Why? because it's easier to program in, has all the tools to do the job,is 900000% more powerful than any microsloth product and will attract trouble makers like bees to honey. It's a given.. Linux = hackerOS that will never change unless you get a new system that has commands like ...
#crash all computers
#make new virus -o erase mbr -o destroy bios
#hack password @ www.whitehouse.gov
Actually that's probably a script kiddie's dream.. as a hacker I prefer the OS on my altair..... toggle switches!
100101101 10001011101 1000101011 1110110101
Simple... distribute pgp signed sources.
if a byte of code is modified then it will ignore all packets from that host.
the nettrek guys have it down to a science!
(Although I am sure someone can get around it.. some of them are tooooo dang good!
very true! my computer and house is running on NUCLEAR power! the only clean and safe power source short of hydro-electric/solar/wind/geothermal. yet we dont have many nukes because the greenpeace idiots spread their lies..
Save the nukes! Bash the seals!
OK. Color me stupid, but since I don't have the "hacker mentality" that they're alluding to, and since they don't come out & say how or what the cheat is, what exactly is it?
Are ppl hacking the results (I thought they were encrypted)? Is the client unsecure and so now ppl are using it as a backdoor into systems running it (God I hope not)? Are ppl copying the results files when they're almost complete, getting a new work unit, swapping the results out, and then sending them back to artificially inflate the numbers (most likely and probably easy to do since *we're all getting the same WU over & over*)?
I hate to jump on the 'me-too' bandwagon but I agree very much with your assessment. Let's give them some time to work out all of the bugs. I find it interesting that we jump down the throats of a non-profit organization for the comments made by one member regarding what to him must be a serious headache.
And as for his comments against this community, I think he has every right to complain. If I had servers crashing left and right and complaints flying in faster than prunes through and old man, the last thing I would want to deal with is a hacked result saying that an analysis that should be taking at least a day to process is only taking some people 20 minutes. Lets all just let them do what they need to do so we can get back to scanning the skies.
This project ultimately means more than just searching for signs of life in the universe. It's a statement of our culture as a whole, and it's need to believe in something greater and bigger than us all. For once in human history we have at our fingertips the ability to reach out to the stars together. Granted this is a very small step towards it, but it is, never-the-less, a step in the right direction.
-The Mythril Dragon
---- Vincit omnia veritas.
I should have known something was _VERY_ wrong at S@H when I saw that the client SUCKED !! What did they do? Write it in BASIC? Of course if it were OS I would have to Fix It Or Shut Up.
It is the worst piece_of_crap software that I have ever used... (rest of flame redacted). I wiped it & went back to www.distributed.net where I belong.
If this is any indication of the quality of science being done there "the ET's will never let us find them."
He's just some user down in Florida that made some stupid statement about 8 tons of fossil fuel being wasted on this. What an idiot!
Everyone is running on fossil fuel? All the computers that were involved would have all been shut down and not be running?
Give me a break. That story only used that lunitic fringe guy to beef up the story instead of reporting on the facts and stating that this is a REASEARCH project....there WILL be some snags along the way.
Besides, it's not like Keating BOUGHT the program!
Moron...
--- "It's not enough that I succeed...everyone else must fail."
Very well said letter. Good job.
--- "It's not enough that I succeed...everyone else must fail."
I can't believe the reactions that have been shown by slashdotters! Do you think Anderson hasn't been checking logs to find out that some of the UNIX/Linux clients are returning packets back with IMPOSSIBLE times!? Are you guys stupid or something to think that it's a baseless comment? It's easy to trace this kind of thing and I'm sure they have. The fact that he refers specifically to the UNIX/Linux versions as being the culprits is that it's really only possible to do this kind of thing with those versions of the client. Add to this the hacker mentality that ANYONE running a version of UNIX automatically has and you will understand that the "hacker mentality" mentioned is using "hacker" in the good sense of the word, and is only pointing out that people using versions of UNIX are more likely to screw with things. If that bothers you, and if you don't admit that that is true, then you have a problem, not them. I believe it is entirely true that "MOST OF THE HEADACHES" have come from the UNIX/Linux community. That is a perfectly true statement, because only the UNIX versions can be messed with like this. Therefor, "most" of the problems DO come from this community. In any case, this is an offhand comment taken out of context, most likely prompted by the reporter, and anyone offened by it is damn insecure in my book.
The fact that Wired got some idiot to email them with a stupid figure of the amount of fuel wasted makes me want to cancel my Wired subscription, not my SETI participation! My computers have been on anyway! It's not like I would constantly shut my machines down if it weren't for SETI! More stupidity and FUD and I'd be ashamed if I were one of the people who have fallen for it.
I'm just sitting here waiting for all the ABSOLUTELY PERFECT distributed computing clients that all the complainers will be writing and releasing, because obviously SETI doesn't know what it's doing but the people who have complained and vowed never to run SETI again do. I mean, come on people! Get off the high horse and get a clue! Nothing is perfect, especially in the first few months of release, and if you think otherwise then , once again, that's your problem, not theirs.
I will be running SETI on as many machines as I can as long as I keep getting a packet at least once a month. It doesn't cost me anything, it looks really neat, and I still feel like I'm doing something useful and wonderful. I'm also not going to give up at the first sign of trouble as many seem to have. Hell, I wouldn't even have an OS on any of my machines if I gave up every time something didn't work perfectly (and this goes for Microsoft, Mac and any UNIX variety you can name. None of them have worked as advertised). To give up so easily on something so noble and possibly Earth shattering simply because the administration got dumped into something over their heads is pathetic. Cut em some slack! Because of all your complaint mail they probably haven't had time to tell you that the pipeline was screwed (which they did point out once they got the time). Like I said, where are all those perfect distributed clients guys? Haven't you had time yet to test them with 1,000,000 simulated users? You haven't? Wow, maybe that's the same problem SETI@Home is having? Gee, imagine that, nobody IS perfect after all...
To expect perfection is to invite your own failure.
> Now lets just be real and say "Stop it!", and quit
> defending obviously dishonorable behavior.
Whilst I don't defend people who want to sabotage
SETI, I think it's a bit rich to make a platform-wide
attack. In any case, presumably the only reason people can send
in multiple copies of the same result is because the SETI people
are sending out the same 115 data points to everyone.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
>In all things there are complainers and there are doers.
/. and complain about some perceived problem? Get a life! Grow up! You don't see me sitting here bitching all day do you? NO! I'm far too busy complai^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdoing real work!!!
Right on! If these damn complainers would start doing instead of complaining... But all they do is bitch and moan. Complain, complain, complain. What is it with them? Nothing better to do with their time? I mean, are they just sitting at the computer during school/work hours with nothing better to do than read
:)
#%@*^!.... SETI@home is a program??? I friggin' thought it was a directive! I guess I'll quit staying up late at night in the attic with a flashlight looking for little grey men.
Thoroughly ticked off,
JRR Tolkien
There have been a number of comments in defense
of the seti@home project. Certainly, it's understandable that they were overwhelmed with users, that they had a few bugs to start with, and
(maybe) even that the windows version is snail-like.
I'm pissed off because I've been running this sucker in the _background_ on all my machines while I work. Needless to say, this has been mildly inconvenient, but I put up with it because I thought I was contributing to real research.
Now I find out that my efforts have been for naught, and further, they don't even have enough regard for the contributors to let us know that we're wasting our time.
Further, I talked my girlfriend into running it
on her computer, with a grand speech about contributing to furtherance of knowledge, and I've been promoting it to friends as a 'cool' thing to do.
Now I look like an idiot.
Those folks have completely ruined their credibility with me, and I definitely won't be wasting any more of my time with them.
Thanks for providing "vent" space,
loopy
What worries me about this is that the project
kept quiet about the problem. They are very bad
on replying to bug reports & problems with the
client s/w as well.
I think it's a little sad that even with a project
of this nature hacking & faking is taking place.
Jesus who cares if your top of the list or not.
Just run the software and help out.
Hope we all noted the bit in the article where he states that people have been cheating. The largest headache apparently 'obviously' has come from the Linux / Unix community. He says it's something to do with 'The hacker mentality'...
I don't think the guys at SETI said they were pissed off at it, though. They just said it was a big headache. I think the whole point is that they're feeling overwhelmed with what has become a big fat Slashdot Effect.
SETI has been surviving all these years through abysmal funding, squatting radiotelescope time, and the only reason they haven't fallen through is because everyone recognises their research as being fundamental, although the chance of positive results are practically nill.
So I say: give them a break, guys. It's normal they take a little while to organise, and at least they're being honest about it.
What would you have done with idle CPU time, anyway? Run Life simulations to generation Googol?
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
The complaints seem kind of short-sighted.
People have to realize the odds against finding intelligent life through this project are pretty long, so these people are crying because they've lost a couple months of work?
Sure, maybe over the last three months the mothership has been transmiting messages about a utopian society, but transmissions will likely continue. If these people wanted to do it in the first place, they should cut such an ambitious project some slack.
And 8 tons of fossil fuel a day? Like all those people would have otherwise turned off their computers.
Waiting patiently for contact,
Mike
Troll Like a Champion Today
Just call it the Rabid Hyping Press Mentality. I don't want to name names, but it is Wired after all.
Always be careful what you say to the police/press
rbb
As for the specific problems with SETI administration, yea there are some real problems with the adminning of the project, but you know, it's a research project run at (and maybe by) a research institution. Let them work the kinks out and move on. Instead of dwelling on how much fossil fues are wasted (which aren't really wasted since the computers would be otherwise idle), how about we all learn from this?
And maybe you nay-sayers could donate your time and expertise to the project.
-- Robert Hayden aka rhayden@geek.net
The Wired article may have been writen over the weekend when there were duplicate packets being sent, but users were reporting new blocks late Saturday and early Sunday.
Refer to the alt.sci.seti newsgroup for the blow by blow details of the problem and its passing (all with time and date stamps)
Jay!!!
We can't make any realistic assumptions about alien life-forms that aren't refracted through our own self-concept as a species. Either we think of ourselves as too primitive to go on the air (an unjustified inferiority complex left over from the arrogance of the Industrial Revolution), or we preen as the only creatures bright enough to "invent" radio (unlikely). Both attitudes are archaic, self-destructive, secretly resentful, and (worse) miss the point.
Continuing the effort to make contact, by whatever means we have, is intrinsically beneficial as a human activity, regardless of whether our local planetary cultures understand why that is so, and regardless of whether we get it right in the first 1000 years of the attempt.
If we are eventually to become galactic citizens of some sort, we'd probably make the best possible first impression if we develop a vaster worldview before we make definitive offworld contact. If we can use the process of seeking that contact to develop a seriously long view of time (in which our "history" is a drop of food coloring) and to cultivate some cosmic patience, at least we might have something reasonable to say when we do build a fancier toy that tunes us in to the request line for the Galactic Top 40.
-- minotaur73 (Any sufficiently advanced technology is incomprehensible.)
When did that happen? What are the details?
Mike Caprio, mikecap@nospamworld.stdspam.com
Digital Renaissance Man - Writer, Coder, & Artist