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.

"3l1t3 HaX0r D00d2" exploiting bugs is worse

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?

Re:I feel personally offended

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.

I don't understand the big deal...

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

Stupid PR mistake

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.

Re:"3l1t3 HaX0r D00d2" exploiting bugs is worse

Worthy science? You're kidding.

This is a guy, with no ties to SETI, with a prerecorded chunk of data, that most astronomers believe is of dubious value. It comes from a very slim section of the radio spectrum. just a handfull of Khz wide, if i remember right.

You're not searching for a needle in a haystack. You're searching for a quark in a haystack.

Furthermore, recent advances in RF technology have made it clear that it's positively idiotic to believe that alien life forms would be using the same modes of radio transmission we do.

Take for instance ultra-wide-band transmissions. They broadcast across the entire spectrum with exceptionally high power, but they do so in picosecond pulses, and the FCC says they can't discern them from background radiation. They don't know how to classify UWB because, while it does interfere with important things like air traffic controll, you never know you're being interefered with.

So lets say aliens use ultra wide band transmissions. is the granularity of SETI data finer than picosecond? Doubtful.

As humans we seem to have an understanding of amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, and phase modulation. phase modulation is still experimental and of questionable value. We're just starting to understand pulse modulation. How many more kinds of modulation are there?

The man who discovered frequency modulation was branded a mad scientist and fired from RCA for wasting precious corporate resources on his hair brained ideas. How many people are quietly researching modes of transmission that don't currently fall into recognizable catagories of reasonable physics?

We're not going to pick up interstellar cell phone calls and listen in on greys discussing family matters. At best we're likely to hear the RFI generated by their equipment. And that's assuming their technologies are vaguely similar to ours. An optical processor doesn't emit RFI. Maybe they use an energy form that doesn't fit into our concept of physical law.

The neat thing about history is, we build upon the past. Having started from an entirely different point, why would a completely foreign culture do things anything like we do?

Re:FUD, FUD, and more FUD

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.

A Consistancy Check, Perhaps?

I hope at least that they're getting the same answer from each client.

Re:"3l1t3 HaX0r D00d2" exploiting bugs is worse

First off buddy get your facts right..This project is very much associated with SETI and is governed by the SETI league and the members of other SETI organizations (Dr. Jill Tarter is on the board of SETI@home so I don't know how much more affiliated with SETI you can get.) Perhaps you should try reading their website, the Website of the SETI League,Project Serendip etc all of which mention an link to SETI@home.
As for dubious science, that is your humble opinion, and not one shared by a lot of the scientists in the field, it appears. So it you don't agree with the science, don't participate. Better yet put your money where your mouth is and design an experiment or system you think would work.
The point is that there are some people out there trying to destroy what science is going on because they think that damaging other people's data and messing with their systems is ok simply because the can. You really didn't address the 'hacking'/'Creacking' problems the project has encountered. If some won did this to distributed.net or one of the projects to calculate PI, would you simply say 'well, chances are RC5 can't be broken so lets not try' ' PI will never be soleved to x digits so don't bother'?

With crap like this going on to legitimate, not-for-profit science, is it any wonder the term 'hacker' gets bad press - grow up, scrit kiddies nad go after MS. Leave the science alone.

Somehow I knew you'd say that

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::

Still seems worthwhile to me...

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.

This is a research project. Get over it.

I realize that the geeks of the Internet have been doing distributed processing for years now, but until SETI@Home, it has never been put in terms that the lay person could understand and want to particpate in. I'm glad to see this whole thing happening to move distributed processing into the masses.

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 [e-mail]