Cheating at Seti@home

Megor writes "Well it was bound to happen, people are cheating on Seti@home to inflate their work unit statistics, and the people who administer Seti are ignoring the complaints. ZDNET has an article explaining how they are cheating."

Holey Moley!

[Anonymous Coward]

A first post which is

1. on-topic
2. gets modded up

What's this world coming to?

Re:whyd they

[murat]

why were they cheating seti, a not for profit orginization, when they could be doing actual work

For positive KARMA!

I might feel like a loser at times, but...

[ClassicG]

all I need to do to feel better about myself is to remember that there are people out there who are so bad that they need to cheat at Seti@Home in order to feel like something worth anything.

Re:whyd they

[simong_oz]

2. Sell units on eBay (it does happen...)

Wow. The depths of humanity that eBay churns up will never stop amazing me.

The saddest thing of all is not that the units are being sold, but that there are people out there buying them. GET A LIFE

Why Cheat?

[orthogonal]

We're cheating because some 133t script-kiddie beamed a message to your solar system, some 50,000 of your years ago.

Only by perverting your Seti@home results will we prevent you from discovering our advanced, trans-lightspeed, galaxy-spanning civilization -- and from discovering that despite our accomplishments, our civilization will fall unless we conquer your planet for water/slaves/Kentucky-Fried-Human (please pick one).

Naturally, as an Alien Commader, I must gloatingly reveal our plans, with the excuse that you puny humans are too primitive to stop us even if you do know.

PS: That Orson Welles broadcast 64 years ago today wasn't a hoax. We got to him just in time.

I'm confused...

[Frnak]

Wasn't seti@home just about scoring high work units?

And what is this extraterrestial stuff people are going on about?

in an ironic way

[Anonymous Coward]

through this cheating the Seti@home project has proved that there is intelligent life in the universe... albeiet life with the ethics of the undead....

Re:in an ironic way

[NanoGator]

"through this cheating the Seti@home project has proved that there is intelligent life in the universe... albeiet life with the ethics of the undead....

They definitely proved a deficiency of intelligence here on earth.

Re:Motivation?

[mosch]

A lot of people are assuming that these people cheated in order to up their stats (because seti stats get ya mad bitches!). I don't buy this for a second.

I believe that these "cheaters" are in fact alien lifeforms, who are covertly working to sabotage the fine research being done by the seti@home project. The project was coming close to discovering the location of their invasion force, so a crack team was sent to earth to disable the earth information gathering project, and to lay the blame squarely at the feet of other earthlings.

those aliens weren't quite clever enough though, were they...