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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