IP: THE SEARCH FOR E.T. YIELDS EARTHLY CHEATS: Edupage, May 25, 2001

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Two computer science doctoral students at Stanford University
> have devised a program to prevent cheating on >have devised a program to prevent cheating on SETI@home and other
> projects that use distributed computing. >projects that use distributed computing. SETI@home draws on the
> unused processing power of users' PCs to help process data
> related to the search for extraterrestrial life. The project has
> become enormously successful--last week its number of users
> passed 3 million. However, officials have noticed a rising
> incidence of cheating among >incidence of cheating among SETI@home users, with users hacking
> into the data their computer is processing, sometimes altering
> the results. Stanford students Ilya Mironov and Philippe Golle
> have devised a system that inserts so-called "ringers," which
> are data checkpoints, into the data file that each user
> processes. If the ringers are missing when the data file is
> returned to SETI, officials know that tampering of some kind
> has taken place. SETI officials say incidents of cheating have
> affected less than one percent of its results, but even that is
> enough to be significant.
> (New York Times, 24 May 2001)



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