SETI Finally Finds Something

QuatumCrypto writes "SETI@home is a distributed processing client from UC Berkeley that installs on the volunteers' home computers and harnesses their processing power in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far nothing noteworthy has comeout of this massive project... that is until today! One of the volunteers was able to track down his wife's stolen laptop using the IP address that SETI@home client reports back to the server. After getting back the laptop his wife said, 'I always knew that a geek would make a great husband.'"

Welcome

SETI@home is a distributed processing client from UC Berkeley that installs on the vounteers' home computers and harnesses their processing power in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Those of you that are visiting Slashdot for the first time and didn't know that, you might want to stick around (and scroll down) because we're going to explain what a Beowulf Cluster is next.

Re:Welcome

In Soviet Russia, Beowulf Cluster explains you!

Re:Welcome

In Soviet Russia, Beowulf Cluster explains you!

And Netcraft confirms it!

Re:Welcome

1) explain what a beowulf cluster is
2) make soviet russia joke
3) make netcraft reference
4) ?????
5) profit!!!



One too many? You decide!

Re:Welcome

But does it run Linux?

Re:Welcome

All your clusters are belong to us!

Re:Welcome

I don't understand all these jokes, you insensitive clod!

Re:Welcome

I for one welcome our new clueless overlords!

Re:Welcome

You appear to be posting a

( ) in Soviet Russia
(x) I for one welcome out new ... overlords
( ) imagine a Beowulf cluster
( ) Does it run Linux
( ) Spam prevention will not work checklist
(x) You must be new here
( ) insensitive clod
( ) in Korea only old people
( ) Netcraft confirms
( ) Stephen King is dead
( ) a highly moderated post from the previous duped story
( ) gee I've never had that probl%!$*%& [No Carrier]

post in an attempt to obtain karma. Your attempt will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular post, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from topic to topic.)

(x) Posts like yours are getting old an tired, and quite frankly we're sick of them
(x) Your User Id is too high
( ) It just isn't funny enough
(x) Funny mods don't give karma

Specifically, your post fails to cater to

( ) Anything relevant to the story
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of moderators
( ) Extensive research into the topic

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Posts similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been highly moderated
( ) That's a common troll that has never been verified
(x) You obviously haven't read the article
(x) You haven't even read the summary
( ) Or the headline
( ) Killing you that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid post, and you're a stupid person for posting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Re:userid's ahem

So is yours.

Re:Welcome

---Joke--->

    O  <--  You.
  --|--
    |
   / \

:)

Re:Welcome

That's OK. Here, have a bowl of hot grits. Don't eat it, just put it down your pants.

Re:Welcome

1) explain what a beowulf cluster is
2) make soviet russia joke
3) make netcraft reference

You forgot to mention that this story is clearly a fake, since it makes the outrageous accusation that at some point in time a woman not only found a geek attractive, but also married him.

Re:Welcome

What's a woman? Is there an ISO standard I can look up somewhere that will tell me what a woman is? I do not understand this concept of attraction. Could somebody please explain it to me?

Re:Welcome

'Woman' is malware that will take over your hardware and software, reorder your contacts and friends lists, removing any that 'Woman' finds unsuitable then inserts other friends and contacts into your address book that you have no wish to ever deal with. Finally 'woman' takes complete control of your schedule and finances leaving you with no control over your own life.

'Woman' will also, if left unchecked, upgrade automatically from 'friend 9.2' to 'girlfriend 3.4' and eventually to 'wife 1.0'. If this happens the only way to get rid of 'woman' is via very expensive software... 'divorce 1.0' which will leave you with even less money than when you had 'wife 1.0' problems.

Re:Welcome

There I was thinking Beowulf was from Dark Ages Scandinavia.

Never mind, perhaps I'm new here.

Re:Welcome

> There I was thinking Beowulf was from Dark Ages Scandinavia.

Hwæt?

Re:Welcome

I, for one, welcome our beowulf explaining overlords.

Re:Welcome

No, someone copied the Wikipedia entry without citing...

But then, that's typical slashdot...

Re:Welcome

now imagine a beowulf cluster of virgins. wait, that's slashdot! ;)

sETi ...

phone home.

Does this mean

that there is intelligent life on Earth?

Re:Does this mean

Well, there is at least one intelligent life form on the planet (me). I can't speak for the 8 billion of you dumbasses, though.

Re:Does this mean

Current [census.gov] estimates [ibiblio.org] are [netlingo.com] 6.6 billion. [wikipedia.org] Where'd you get 8 from? And who's the dumbass?

Re:Does this mean

Holy crap, he's posting ... FROM THE FUTURE!

Re:Does this mean

Perhaps he's including dolphins and mice.

Re:Does this mean

Well, as Bill Watterson observed, "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."

Gah!

I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices cheered and were suddenly silenced.

solution for everyone else

There is a simple solution for all the MAC and Linux *NIX folks out there.

Write a small script, I call it "callhome" and a line in your crontab to have it called each hour.

~>cat bin/callhome
#!/bin/bash
rm -f ~/.locate-laptop
date > ~/.locate-laptop
w >> ~/.locate-laptop
/sbin/ifconfig -a 2>&1 >> ~/.locate-laptop
/usr/sbin/traceroute -q 1 -nP ICMP 108.169.242.00 2>&1 | head -15 >> ~/.locate-laptop
scp -q ~/.locate-laptop remote_user@108.169.242.00:~

~>grep callhome /etc/crontab
27 * * * * username /home/username/bin/callhome

You'll have to set up public key login with no passphrase for the scp
to work without a password to the remote machine

Re:solution for everyone else

Better yet, have it poll a file on your web server which you can use to tell it to activate the built-in camera and send you images of whoever stole your laptop. A command-line utility exists for OSX which can simply dump an image to a file, which you can then simply |mail.

Hell, activate a keylogger while you're at it, and you'd have no trouble finding out exactly who they are.

Re:solution for everyone else

Better yet, just fucking lock it to your desk.

In all seriousness though...

why doesn't someone do a 'phone home' laptop insurance program that provides tracking information just like this? (privacy issues aside (until the first reply to this comment; see below)).

It could be nicely open sourced, and run via a p2p network to distribute the load for the tracking servers. Obviously a lot of details would have to be worked out to avoid abuse, but it could be as simple as sending an "I'm here" message encrypted with a dedicated private key to the p2p network. The person who wants to track their stolen goods just pops the public key (stored on a CD/usb stick/online, generated on install) into the network and it comes back with the last known location. No?

Re:In all seriousness though...

They exist. For instance: Lowjack [lojackforlaptops.com]

They claim their software will survive a hard drive format, but not sure how... anyone know?

ouch

Sensationalism strikes back ... and it hurts. Anyway, it proves that at least one geek in the entire world (universe ?) had sex that night.

From the TFA:

"Kimberly's writings were safe, and the thieves didn't appear to have broken into her e-mail or other personal folders."

How, exactly, do you break into a personal folder? Is double-clicking it called "breaking" in these days? I thought the conventional term was "opening"...

What a crock!

Maaan! I was reading through that whole summary, excitedly awaiting my chance to welcome our new overlords..... and all they found was a laptop!?!??! What a crock!

Nothing noteworthy

"So far nothing noteworthy has come out of this massive project"

Dismissed a trend-setting project with just that one line. Of course, it does not matter that SETI@Home showed the power of volunteer computing for the first time, led to new advances in distributed computing, motivated Grid computing and PlanetLab among others and spun off BOINC, an open source project that serves as a base for similar @Home projects.

But, of course, it no find me any ALIEN!!! Bah,

SETI finds...

... unintelligent life on earth.

What a let down

Man, if I ever meet whoever is responsible for that headline, I'm going to burn down your house.
I haven't felt this let down since I walked in on my dad bangin my mom while wearing a Santa costume on Christmas morning.

Re:What a let down

I haven't felt this let down since I walked in on my dad bangin my mom while wearing a Santa costume on Christmas morning.

ELIZA replies: Why were you wearing a Santa costume?

She's in for a shock...

I always knew that a geek would make a great husband

Sure it turned out handy this one freak incident, but wait till there's smoke in the house and he looks back and forth between the plasma screen and the laptop a couple times, finally grabs the laptop and is out the door without so much as a look in her direction.

Of course, if the laptop started the fire then the choice is much easier

Tsk, noob

You have her grab the laptop and you grab the plasma screen. Geez. You call yourselve a geek and cannot even figure out this simple puzzel?

Now if the comment had been "I always knew that a geek would make a great father" then you would have had a point.

Geek or Alien?

Ok, which one is more likely:

SETI finding intelligent life?
or a GEEK getting married?

Re:

Now now, they're just following the pros, who will stoop to the most offensive [cnn.com] shit [cnn.com] for the sake of cutesy headlines.

Re:Stop the headline grab-assing please

Since the headline, uncharacteristically, closely mirrors the content of the article I can only surmise your bitterness stems from the line "I always knew that a geek would make a great husband." Cheer up bunky, it could happen to a 'Dotter. Some day. The odds are certainly no worse than finding, say, extraterrestrial life.

Agreed - "finally finds something" is harsh

These are some of the greatest questions ever asked - Are we alone ? Is there anyone/anything like us in the rest of the universe ? Would it be possible to communicate with an entirely alien species ?

Quite apart from the Wow! [wikipedia.org] signal (so I guess they found something after all), there's a world of difference between the Seti@home distributed computer program, and the SETI institute - a collection of individuals who have SETI-capable telescopes [gornall.net]. The SETI institute is not at all connected with SETI@home, and it is they who are 'seti', or at least they have the greatest claim, having been 'SETI' for years previously...

It's not actually hard to make a radio telescope - get a big dish, an LNA (low-noise amplifier for the signal), a microwave receiver, and a PC (windows or linux). Oh, and lots of space for that dish :-) Total cost is ~$2000 if you buy everything. Ebay is your friend regarding getting stuff cheap, though :-) It cost me significantly less than that... So, get searchin!

Simon.

Re:Stop the headline grab-assing please

Stop writing misleading headlines like these just to grap page-views ...

Ah, I believe you mispelled grep.

Re:Stop the headline grab-assing please

That was a truthful headline. Something WAS found using SETI@home. If SETI@home had found evidence of intelligent life, the headline would've said so. As if the truth of the headline wasn't enough, the huge foot icon should've been a big indication that it's humorous. Furthermore, you are the exact kind of person who needs this kind of article. Laugh a little bit. Life's short, may as well enjoy it.

Re:The Search

Well don't be too hard on him. Seti@Home is some kind of demon; it posessed my computer. After I closed the window, it was still running!

Re:Question...

Simple enough, though it generally requires a warrent.

All blocks of IP addresses are owned by somebody, mostly ISPs.

Once you have an IP address, you look up who owns it and you call them. They do their research, looking at things such as DNS records, DHCP assignments, DSLAM logs, etc... They then look up which customer that was, and there you go.

In a corporate enviroment a simply DNS lookup should give you a computer name, a little more the switchport it's connected to, and a little digging who's logged into it.