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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.
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?
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?
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."
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."
I don't think you're taking Dr. Anderson's comments properly.
Dr. Anderson caught some people cheating. The majority of those people were running Linux/Unix computers.
This is a fact. You may not like that fact, but it is a fact nevertheless. Dr. Anderson wasn't launching an attack on anyone -- he was simply stating a fact: Most of the cheaters are coming from Linux/Unix circles.
The only way one could find that **fact** offensive is if s/he believed that Dr. Anderson was lying...but since we have very little evidence to support that notion (and indeed, a great deal of evidence to the contrary), it had best be discarded right here and right now.
Next, Dr. Anderson offers a brief explanation for that fact, as scientists tend to do. His explaination: It must be the hacker mentality amongst that camp.
NOTE: Dr. Anderson did not say that all Linux/Unix users were dishonest....he did not make any blanket statements that all Linux/Unix users were causing any problems.
He simply observed that most of the cheating is coming from some (NOT ALL) Linux/Unix users because most of the people who use that platform like to explore code, discover how programs work, etc etc etc. In other words, he's saying Linux/Unix users are hackers of some sort (a pretty well-founded statement, if you properly interpret the word 'hacker')...and really, it would take a hacker-type to figure out how to fool their computers. Indeed, if you interpret the term hacker properly (as Dr. Anderson most likely does, given his background in Computer Science), then really Dr. Anderson is paying a complement to the Linux/Unix community, saying that the community has a large concentration of individuals who have the know-how to do such a thing.
So, a more realistic "real world" interpretation of Dr. Anderson's comments would be:
"I'm late to class because I got mugged in a seedy part of town by some African-Americans [NOTE: Statement of fact]. They probably mugged me because they needed my money [NOTE: Observation based on the fact that most people living in a seedy part of town probably don't have a lot of money]."
There's nothing too inflamatory about that...and chances are that if someone did take offense those statements, most of us would roll our eyes and say "whatever."
So, if you're offended by Dr. Anderson's comments, get over it. He doesn't have a vendetta against you. He's not thinking that you're cheating. He's not making any derogatory statements about the Linux/Unix community. Chances are that many of the people on the SETI@Home team are a part of the Linux/Unix community (someone had to code that app, and it did come out first). Stop trying to be a martyr.
He's simply saying that most of the cheaters are running Linux/Unix (a factual statement) and then says that it's probably because (in essence) most Linux/Unix users have the skills necessary to do such a thing.
Perhaps a more appropriate response to Dr. Anderson's comments would be tracking down those people who are cheating and giving them a heavy handed smack down (verbally, of course). Imagine how much it would suck if we missed a block containing a stray extraterrestial transmission, because some dorkface downloaded the block, dumped it and sent a "done" message back to the server.
> 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!
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
Exactly. When word first got out about SETI, the d.net folks asked if they wanted to use the existing client/server as a base or handle adminstration. SETI said no. Serves them right...
Jason "glad I didn't waste my time" Untulis
Idle machines use less energy. When idle, the
processor executes the halt instruction which
saves power. This does not hold for Windows 95.
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.
The problem is that the distributed.net people don't seem to care about hyping a worthwhile project. Look at all of their banner ads which are talking about RC5-64. RC5-64 is at this point a worthless project. All it will prove once they finally do get the key (if they do) is that 64 bit crypto is crackable but pretty hard without specialized hardware. How much computing power it takes to crack RC5-64 using brute-force is known. The only thing which was unknown was how much power a bunch of people on the internet could cobble together. That is now known. Therefore distributed projects such as this should concentrate on using their massive computing throughput to do something useful such as SETI, Gulomb rulers, or Mersene Primes. (or anything else which will produce useful results) I can see why the SETI people didn't want to use distributed.net -- they didn't want to play second fiddle in hype to RC5-64. It's unfortunate that they're wasting cycles like this, but I can completely understand why they didn't want to use distributed.net.
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."
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