SETI Orphans

A couple-three years ago I was into sharing CPU cycles with the SETI project, and was racking up points for Team BeOS. Yesterday I got a message from someone congratulating me for getting back on board and checking in new units. Huhn? I haven’t run a SETI client for at least two years, but sure enough, it shows fresh units from me being checked in as of last night. Two theories:

1) Someone hijacked my SETI account … but why would anyone do this? There’s no incentive.

2) One of several old BeOS/Windows/Linux machines I’ve sold or given away long ago has been booted into BeOS for the first time in a long time recently, and is happily crunching keys in the background, unbeknownst to the new owner. Heh. Thanks, whoever you are, wherever you are… ;)

Music: Astrud Gilberto :: The Gentle Rain

7 Replies to “SETI Orphans”

  1. 1) Someone hijacked my SETI account … but why would anyone do this? There’s no incentive.

    I read maybe a month ago about some SETI teams cheating. It naturally upset SETI when they discovered it because any hint of that kind of thing could discredit their research. I don’t remember any of the details and didn’t bookmark the page. Maybe team BeOS should check it out, I’m sure they wouldn’t want to be implicated in massaging any figures.

  2. Less romantic perhaps, but preferable to this

    “One hopes the /. crowd knows the perils of discarding storage with sensitive data but this article drives home the point. Two MIT grad students bought used drives from eBay and secondhand computer stores. Among the data found on the 158 drives were 5,000 credit-card numbers, porn, love-letters and medical information.”

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