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Seti@HOME Cracked By Aliens?
Chris L. Mason
writes "The Seti@HOME website appears to have been cracked. The front page has been replaced by a picture of ALF (from the really bad comedy.) However, the perpetrators have been somewhat polite about it. A comment in the new html tells where the original page has been backed up. " Might be fixed by the time you read this, but it really happened. The story was submitted by a number of slashdot readers almost immediately. Thanks.
The whole question of "If the speed of light is constant, how come it slows down in things like lenses" stems from the fact that the explanation of refraction given in high school textbooks is much simpler than what is actually going on.
If I remember correctly (it's been a while), what happens when light passes through a transparent medium (like glass or water) is that it interacts with the electrons in the material so as to be briefly absorbed and then re-emitted in the same direction (I may be mangling this - like I said, it's been a while). This kind of interaction is logical when you think about it - a photon is a packet of coupled electric and magnetic fields, while matter is made up of charged particles (electrons and atomic nuclei [small enough to look like points to most photons]).
The net effect of photons being absorbed and re-emitted is that the propagation of the light wave seems to slow down in the material. In actuality, the photons are still travelling at the speed of light in vacuum - they're just not travelling very far before interacting with the matter they're travelling through.
It turns out that a very small fraction of the photons do manage to travel through the material without interacting with anything (though this drops off very sharply with distance). Someone built a device a few years ago that used this effect to take "x-rays" of peoples' hands with visible light (detecting these "ballistic" photons only; their pattern naturally varied depending on how absorbing the materials they passed through were, and was sharp because the photons hadn't scattered off of anything). Check back issues of Scientific American (or possibly Discover) for the reference.
Recent speculation about the speed of light in vacuum not being constant stems from completely different observations, probably celestial.
I'll have a mirror up for you all at http://www.gashalot.com/setihack if anyone wants to see this and it's gone from the SETI servers.
This is actually one of the funny website hacks that I have seen recently, instead of one that uses some 3l33t h4x0r sp34k trying to free Kevin Mitnik (or however you spell his name).
-R
If you look at the source of the page, you can see the following:
//---! original index.html is backed up as index.html.old !---//
(took out greater-than and less-than signs)
Looks like the crackers were just having a little bit of fun. I found it kind of amusing. If the page is gone, at any time later, im gonna mirror it at http://high.amvalue.com/~edgy/seti in case anyone misses it.
You've got it all wrong!
It didn't get hacked -- that's the message from outer space that they found!
I remember a while back /. was hacked. Did you
guys ever find out how they gain access?
Stephen
Excuse me, Alf was one of my favorite shows!
And I think that anyone else out there who is being honest would admit that too..
This raises, at least in my mind, concerns over the integrity of the data that SETI@Home is sending out... Remember the fiasco about duplicate data? And now their webserver gets hacked...
What's to say that their data server hasn't been hacked, and random sections deleted, or tainted?
-- BluKnight, who forgot his password
most likely, seeing as Gordon Schumway is Alf's name on his home planet. :P
perhaps Alf and ET got on their computer (which according to ID4 is compatible with the Mac) and thought they might drop some hints...
have they logged their ip? cos it could be past 255 (like in the movie 'the net').
0-255 reserved for earth, and the rest for the aliens...
http://www.pinball.nu/setihack/index.html
Enjoy
That hack looks an awful lot like Microsoft's new homepage..
For all those taking this too seriously I have one thing to say (well maybe two) lighten up. I don't see it anywhere even close to destructive. Hell, they backed up the old index.html file, what more do you want from them? I found it funnny, its not like it will take them hours and hours of effort to restore. I just hope the people who did it tell the seti people how they did it so the security hole can be fixed. Other than that I think most people just need to lighten up. Though I am glad to see that a good number of the geeks out there do have a sense of humor about things like this that were just ment to be funny.
If you downloaded code from SETI@Home and ran it without reading the source and compiling it yourself, then you should be worried that their security is so lax. Perhaps you really installed a trojan that is even now uploading your /etc/passwd file to a cracked ftp server somewhere. If you installed it behind a company firewall, you should be even more worried.
.....and he must die!
-jpeg
Unfortunatly, not. If you site gets cracked, you can't assume anything on the machine is safe-you need to wipe it, reinstall, apply every patch that you can find, and then grovel over a backup of the hacked site to see if you find a new hole. It's an enormous PITA.
It may be funny to the joker who decided to post it, and it does seem harmless, but the sysadmin who runs that machine has just found himself with a minium 48 hour job-and then, of course explaining to the boss-no, the Primary Investigator, what the hell happened, and why he didn't stop it.
(The PI is the guy who got the grant. They are not noted for thier sense of humor-or proportion)
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
You guys are missing the point. Now, this has been said before, but I'll say it again. As a sys admin, you have to worry that since the machine was cracked, there are other security holes (read: trojans). Just because the crackers put a nice little comment in the index.html saying the old file was copied to index.html.old doesn't mean that something more malicious wasn't done. Who knows. But there are other ways of notifying the admin other than leaving your mark in such a manner as this.