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

[suso]

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

[Dr. Eggman]

In Soviet Russia, Beowulf Cluster explains you!

Re:Welcome

[Dachannien]

In Soviet Russia, Beowulf Cluster explains you!

And Netcraft confirms it!

Re:Welcome

[hobo sapiens]

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

[Mercano]

But does it run Linux?

Re:Welcome

[Nasheer]

All your clusters are belong to us!

Re:Welcome

[rahmza]

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

Re:Welcome

[charlieman]

I for one welcome our new clueless overlords!

Re:Welcome

[complete loony]

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!

Chuck & the List

[norminator]

Chuck Norris knows all about the list... he IS the list, and he'll give a roundhouse kick to the face to anyone who repeats the list without permission.

Re:userid's ahem

[Andy Dodd]

So is yours.

Re:Welcome

[zCyl]

---Joke--->

    O  <--  You.
  --|--
    |
   / \

:)

Re:Welcome

[Dr. Jest]

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

Re:Welcome

[McFadden]

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

[DeadChobi]

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?

RTFM

[charlieman]

man woman

Re:

[da5idnetlimit.com]

man woe man ?

That explains it, I guess...

Re:Welcome

[mindwhip]

'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:

[Res3000]

But... will it run on linux? Or do I need first some wine?

Re:

[garcia]

But the real question is whether or not SETI@Home can find CowboyNeal's BSD box that's serving pages about Stephen King's death.

Re:Welcome

[ChunderDownunder]

There I was thinking Beowulf was from Dark Ages Scandinavia.

Never mind, perhaps I'm new here.

Re:Welcome

[Mr. Bad Example]

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

Hwæt?

Re:Welcome

[bobscealy]

I, for one, welcome our beowulf explaining overlords.

Re:

[Crazyscottie]

I, for one, welcome our SETI-enabled, laptop-stealing, Russian Beowulf Cluster overlords.

Re:

[StrahdVZ]

In Soviet Russia, extraterrestrials search for you!

Re:

[neuro.slug]

11! = 39916800, that's how many.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Beowulf is a design for high-performance parallel computing clusters on inexpensive personal computer hardware. Originally developed by Thomas L. Sterling and Donald Becker at NASA, Beowulf systems are now deployed worldwide, chiefly in support of scientific computing.

A Beowulf cluster is a group of usually identical PC computers running a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Unix-like operating system, such as Linux or BSD. They are networked into a small TCP/IP LAN, and have libraries and programs install

Re:Welcome

[GeffDE]

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

But then, that's typical slashdot...

Re:

[complete loony]

Oh well, at least it was posted anon. That way there's no karma whoring.

Still there's still some room for blatantly obvious karma whoring for the people explaining the plagiarism and other follow up meta-comments pointing out the blatant karma whoring. Followed by post that explain how the moderation system works.

I suppose I should leave some grammatical and spealing errors in this comment to set up someone else for some cheap mod points.

Re:

[gardyloo]

I, for one, welcome our virginal slashdot, Beowulf-ignorant readers!

Re:Welcome

[Hooya]

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

Re:

[Peter Cooper]

It wouldn't surprise me. Whenever a story comes up about Ruby (which has been mentioned about two trillion times on Slashdot) someone always whines about Slashdot assuming everyone knows what Ruby is and that they don't know.

sETi ...

[thrillseeker]

phone home.

Does this mean

[fredrated]

that there is intelligent life on Earth?

Re:Does this mean

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[EvanED]

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

[VultureMN]

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

Re:Does this mean

[Trogre]

Perhaps he's including dolphins and mice.

Re:

[copdk4]

i dunno, but sure there is an intelligent WIFE..
totally flattered about her statement on geeks making great husbands :)

Re:Does this mean

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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!

[StikyPad]

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

Re:

[BobSutan]

You have no idea how right you are. Whoever let this article's title slip by should be tickled until they puke.

It's a trap!

[Bamafan77]

One of the voluteers was able to track down his wife's stolen laptop using the IP address that SETI@home client reports back to the server.

It's a trap! The Emporer allowed the IP address to be found. We're flying into a fully armed and operational battlestation! Those defense shields are up! Call off the attack!

solution for everyone else

[drDugan]

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:

[rodgster]

Why not just set the bios password and harddrive password on you laptop (new stuff with the security chip) which would make it of little value to all but 0.00001% of people for anything more than parts?

And what would stop someone from deleting the disk partitions and installing windows?

Re:

[Perey]

It's the difference between protection and recovery. drDugan's callhome (and TFA's use of SETI@home, of course) provides a chance of recovery but reduces protection (they can boot it). Locking down the boot sequence provides pretty solid protection, but your chances of getting it back move closer to nil.

Re:solution for everyone else

[seanadams.com]

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh. The first thing any idiot thief would do would be install Windows over my GNU/Linux system, not run it happily using a login/pass they don't have until I track her down.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[joe_bruin]

scp -q ~/.locate-laptop remote_user@108.169.242.00:~

Let me get this straight: you have a machine that you're obviously worried about being stolen configured to have passwordless ssh access to your remote machine? May I recommend HTTP instead?

Re:

[Nasarius]

You realize that it's trivial to set up a *nix user with no permissions beyond his home directory, right? Or a user with a login shell that's just a logging script.

Re:

[Lorkki]

This has precisely what advantage over not letting the thief access any part of your system directly?

Re:

[Nasarius]

Uh...being able to track down your laptop would be the advantage.

Would it also trigger mindless fear for you if the OP used a CGI script on a web server? The potential security problems there would be slightly greater than the no-input login script.

Re:

[Lorkki]

I'm thinking more along the lines of a simple and stupid daemon that listens for input and writes it onto the disk. Advantage being that the local end is the only one that has anything to do with the file system, so you have less variables in play.

In all seriousness though...

[user24]

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?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[user24]

yeah but that's $49.99 (per year!), and if it survives formatting, it probably does that by rootkiting the box to some degree, and "We're sorry, the Computrace LoJack for Laptops self-management site does not support the web browser you are currently using." (firefox 2.0.0.1). icky.

Re:

[Woy]

If you dig a bit in that website you'll find your answer:

Unsupported Browser Detected! We're sorry, the Computrace LoJack for Laptops self-management site does not support the web browser you are currently using. You must use Internet Explorer 5.5 (or later) to access this site.

Don't expect magic where you can't even see competence.

Re:

[slashdot.org]

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

That's an interesting claim. First of all I would guess they are going with the DOS/Windows definitition of a format. If that's what they are talking about, then yes, it is technically possible because although a format rewrites a partition, it does not change the initial code that gets loaded from the disk, which resides in the MBR (Master Boot Record). The MBR points to the partition that the OS sits on, and you ca

Re:

[The One and Only]

It could be nicely open sourced, and run via a p2p network

I've seen P2P networks proposed as the solution to everything on Slashdot. Intermittent less-than-1-kilobyte pings carrying a unique user ID are not unmanageable.

Re:

[user24]

no, but someone still has to manage it; p2p offers (afaik) the cheapest, most resilient way of doing something like this. If it's not done via p2p and instead involves a central host, who's going to foot the bill for the host, even it is a small bill? Much better to let the users manage the hosting.

Re:

[AusIV]

There's a great one already: dyndns.com [dyndns.com]. It's intended as a means for people with dynamic IP addresses to be able to host websites, but it's a good way to simply register a computer's IP address with a remote server. I have one computer that runs a web-server that actually uses the dyndns address, but every computer I have has it's own dynamic address and updates when the IP changes. If anyone ever steals one of my computers and plugs it into the internet, I can find the IP address and hopefully recover the

Re:

[StikyPad]

The problem is that such a program would become a victim of its own success. The more people who know of it's existance, the less likely that a thief would connect a laptop to a network (or even allow it to boot up) without first formatting the drive or providing other bootable media.

A homebrew solution (or hoping that something like seti@home went unnoticed) would be your best bet.

ouch

[GlitchyBits]

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

Re:

[CortoMaltese]

Calm down. Installing SETI@home and having a wife call you a geek don't make you one.

And if that guy really is a geek, what do you think he was doing the night he got his stolen laptop back? Huh? HUH?!

From the TFA:

[ATAMAH]

"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"...

Re:

[atomic-penguin]

No, Windows cannot encrypt user data by itself. Simply copy those so-called "encrypted" files to a non-NTFS filesystem, and they are anything but encrypted.

Re:

[atomic-penguin]

I'm just going on what Microsoft has documented in the Microsoft Press literature. Filesystem encryption implemented this way is certainly not as foolproof as say something like a PGP encrypted file.

Here is a perfectly valid example: I copy a Microsoft "encrypted" file from a workstation to a file share which also happens to have NTFS. That file will be encrypted at the workstation, and it will be encrypted on the file server. It will NOT be encrypted over the wire. That may even be okay for some peopl

SETI

[edwardpickman]

Where no thief has gone before.

What a crock!

[StarvingSE]

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!

Re:

[NiceRoundNumber]

I for one welcome our new laptop overlords.

<ducks>

Re:

[KillerBob]

Bad news for the aliens if it was an Apple, though... Independance Day is only a few months away :P

Old News

[coreyfro]

Here's what I did for a client. I installed the distributed.net client on all their machines with a different ID per. If one went missing, I just waited until it started posting again.

One was recovered. I don't know out of how many thefts, but it worked.

http://stats.distributed.net/participant/psearch.p hp?project_id=5&st=coreyfro [distributed.net]

Some are still posting to this day.

216264(-1) [e-mail] 13-Feb-2001 08-Feb-2002 361 791
218871(-1) [e-mail] 31-Jan-2

Nothing noteworthy

[whackeroony]

"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...

[Anonymous Coward]

... unintelligent life on earth.

What a let down

[Joebert]

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

[ciaran.mchale]

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?

And you thought

[mschuyler]

Geeks couldn't get laid.

A good logo for SETI...

[Cookie_Monster_Troll]

would be Linus sitting in the pumpkin patch. :)

She's in for a shock...

[Leuf]

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

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

A better solution for everyone else.

[chris_sawtell]

See the Google cache of "Exactly what the Dr. Ordered"

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:Ui0HtwBn6ZAJ:w ww.kyne.com.au/~mark/software/satellite.php+site:w ww.kyne.com.au+mark+satellite&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&i e=UTF-8 [72.14.253.104]

I know the posting is just a oneliner, but it is informative and if everybody used the software it would really increase the recovery rate of stolen Laptops no end. ( Unix based ones anyway )

Wait a minute...

[d474]

...are we to understand that E.T.'s (who listen to bad rap music) stole this laptop?
I RTFA, and the police used the IP to locate the laptop, but no one has been arrested. Hmmm...

MIB: "We'll take over from here."
Police Man: "But this thug stole a woman's laptop!"

(MIB puts on dark glasses)

MIB: "Officer, I'm going to need you to stare into this pen for me for just a second..."

Geek or Alien?

[toetagger1]

Ok, which one is more likely:

SETI finding intelligent life?
or a GEEK getting married?

SETI == ?

[HikingStick]

So now SETI also stands for "Search for Egregious Thieving Idiots"

Re:

[Nasarius]

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:

[MyLongNickName]

I was about to post a snappy reply, but then I noticed your nick name. With truth in advertising like that, we can't be too surprised with your posts...

Re:Stop the headline grab-assing please

[Shelled]

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

[Space cowboy]

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:

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

For the love of God, don't read a newspaper or take a journalism class. Attention grabbing headlines are the norm.

Re:Stop the headline grab-assing please

[ScrewMaster]

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

Ah, I believe you mispelled grep.

Re:

[joshetc]

Why is this guy modded down? I personally don't care about extraterrestrial life, obviously some do. Headlines like this are the equivilant of posting that we have a Jessica Alba sex tape in the subject then putting a picture of two tapes fucking and a headshot of Jessica Alba for TFA...

Re:

[Megajim]

After the initial rush-disappointment, I noticed that it must be an official Goofass® headline, given the official Monty-Python-foot icon, which generally denotes time-wasting non-serious ignore-this-if-you're-looking-for-useful-info after-hours filler that is occasionally found on this otherwise quite informative site. Maybe the headline would have been less horrifically offensive if it was in YRO.

Re:Stop the headline grab-assing please

[Cheapy]

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:

[ack154]

It seems the opposite actually. Since the guy that stole the laptop was not intelligent enough to turn something like SETI off... he is now minus one stolen laptop.

Re:The Search

[Anonymous Coward]

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:

[Em Adespoton]

Actually, this gave me a great idea. Run your own DNS repeater, and log its DNS requests. Nobody but you would have a device configured to use your DNS server, and it is a location vector unlikely to be noticed - more likely to be wiped when someone formats your HD. You get the added benefit of viewing what the person who stole your equipment is doing with it ;)

Re:

[gardyloo]

Wait... the laptop came back with 20 "rap songs" which were completely and utterly unintelligible...?

        Ah. A vast improvement over the usual, then.

Re:Question...

[Firethorn]

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.

Re:

[PhunkySchtuff]

Four Letters for you, R, T, F and A.

"I always knew that a geek would make a great husband," she said. "He always backed up all my data, but this topped it all. It became like `Mission: Impossible' for him, looking for hard evidence for the cops to use. ... He's a genius - my hero."

(emphasis mine)