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S@H daily team stats 12/17

H

Hellburner

Senior Member <br>Elite Member
Local group production 12/16:

04 HW France....................(+30678)................ +11753
05 S@N...............................(+22131).................. +9723
06 TA.................3853439..................................... +8284
:
10 BBR...............................(-299705).................. +9100
 
1st! 😀

Nice day but still beaten by the rest :Q
How do those Frenches do this???

Thanks HB! 🙂
 
Originally posted by: CyGoR
1st! 😀

Nice day but still beaten by the rest :Q
How do those Frenches do this???

Thanks HB! 🙂
Click to expand...
Here's the simple answer... They're cheating. Up until only a few months ago they were doing 6K per day. Now they're doing 50% more on a regular basis and double that sometimes? I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. The cheating issue is really getting old. I jumped over to the SETI@Work site just to look around. I couldn't find the HW France team but I clicked on a few teams and found several examples of very questionable production. I'm talking members who do 50 WU's per day then jump to several thousand the next.

To be honest, it's getting to the point that I don't care where we/I finish in the standings anymore. If I had more time and any motivation I'd be changing my clients to another project...
 
Robor,
I think you're right about that and I can understand your feelings..
I'll just wait and see what the Berkeley people will do..
 
Good Morning TeAm Mates,

Well, S@N got a new member with over 2,500 WUs. But I'm affraid our old friend "Sith Lords" have not changed their behavior one iota. Thus the following email was just sent to my contact at S@H HQ.

_______________

Good morning XXXXXXXXXXX,

Just as I suspected, the HWF User "Sith Lords" has not been fazed by the reduction of his account. Today, he once again flushes a huge dump of (I'm betting) previously crunched WUs ... 3,790 WUs.

The only way to handle this situation is to remove this account completely. By only removing the duplicate WUs, the wrong message is being sent. In effect, without any more severe penalty than the removal of the "less than honest" WUs there is no determent. Dishonest Users will just "give it a go" without any fear of getting caught.

It may be too late for Seti At Home - 1 but I would like to suggest that a "committee" be formed that would do nothing but deal with situations like the "Sith Lords". Instead of taking the valuable time of you, other scientists, astronomers, and computer science professors, I would like to recommend this "distasteful" duty be assigned to a group of "volunteers".

This group, for now let's just call them the "Integrity Commission", should be small in number. It could be comprised of members of the top teams who would serve without compensation. This small group would need access to the database and tools necessary to carry out their function. With an appeal process, to insure that this group does not itself get out of control, I believe the integrity of the statistics could be maintained.

I understand that the client for BOINC may be much more difficult to hack or take advantage but you know how determined some people can be to destroy and damage. I am concerned that if we do not take steps to insure the integrity of the accounting process, there will be a significant fall off in participation of USERS.

Sincerely,

Greg
(Smokeball - TeAm AnandTech)

 
I crack for the science, not for the team stats. My WU's are a hunt for aliens. Other than me not liking cheaters or wanting to be on a team with cheaters, I don't really care what place we end up at.

Of course, I think I picked the best team to be on <grin>.

Michael
 
Thanks Smokeball for sending this message to your contact. Hopefullt they will take action according to your advice..
 
Thanks Greg. I'm glad the project has participants like you and I'm sure Berkeley does as well. Hopefully they will listen to your suggestions and take action. These cheaters not only run the fun involved with being on a team, they also reduce the credibility of the project.
 
Nice output by us 🙂 but.........

Smokeball
Excellent email you've sent there ,hopefully this time they'll delete him if he is cheating.

Btw just a thought ,whilst I did argue against your position for deleting the whole account on the grounds of 'why delete the good resultss?' ,I just realised that S@H doesn't need to delete the results themselves ,they could just seperate the good results from the account & then delete the account...........if thats possible?
 
they could just seperate the good results from the account & then deleted the account...........if thats possible?

It's a database thing. While doing what you say is possible the real question is "do they have a procedure for this?"
Most likely not. Doing it would take a matter of seconds at the console for a skilled DB guy. Coming up with a policy and procedure would take much more time out of their schedule.
For instance, if I were in charge of the world (or at least in charge of their DB) I could create a user and then dump all good WU's into that account. It would be an anonomous user not connected to any group. It would be a "good WU dump" where all the good little WU"s go when deleting an account.

The logic might go something like:

Determine account has cheat WU's
Lock user account
Delete bad WU's\
Determine if account was hijacked by a cheater or if the user was the cheater (this is the difficult part)
If user is cheater
Reassign good WU's to the Good WU Dump
Zero account
Ban user
If account hijacked
????????????????????
????????????????????
????????????????????


Of course that person (cheater) could then just start another account and keep doing same, but at least there would be a little sting to the action.
The hard part of the whole thing is determining if the cheating is being done by the user or if it is a user who had his account hijacked by a cheater.
 
If account hijacked

Then delete bad results
Block IP of hijacker (they have already done this,alledgedly)
Restore account

Of course thats the easy part ,determining whether the bad results are from a hijacker or from a cheater is the hard part(as you said Wiz) ,however it is highly likely that any active & interested user of SETI will immediatley or very quickly notice any huge influx of results & could report this to S@H.
I would guess the next step would be much more time consuming?
Presumable the physical location of a person can be determined by the IP? ,this would also be a good indicator ,especially if from another country! (not much good if in the same locality)
 
Thanks HB

Very good messasge Greg, I really hope they come to the same conclusion!

Btw just a thought ,whilst I did argue against your position for deleting the whole account on the grounds of 'why delete the good resultss?' ,I just realised that S@H doesn't need to delete the results themselves ,they could just seperate the good results from the account & then delete the account...........if thats possible?
Click to expand...

Well, don't they send the WU's to difrferent accounts? If this is true, then there should be no lost science since some other pc's would crunch the same wu's. And if this is right then they should just delete the accounts!!


Paf
 
Good point! ,each WU is done 2-3 times ,some might need recrunching but in the scheme of things a few 10,000 could be recrunched quickly by all the active users.
 
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