Hmmm

[Smoke]

Isn't this a strange pattern?

 

[Poof]

Is he still listed on their team? It seems almost all of the big producers have been purged... I couldn't find that account on the setiatwork stats link here... ... although my mind might be fried after looking at that! :Q

 

[Smoke]

The chart is not of a member of S@N.

 

[Poof]

He currently appears as #32 on the top 1000 chart with a web link attached to his account name that points to some school system in South Carolina... Assuming this is the same person...

[EDIT - you know you are making my brain hurt, right?? ]

 

[Smoke]

There was an almost duplicate looking chart that disappeared yesterday because the user changed his name. I thought I'd take a snapshot of this one before it disappeared because of a name change too. :Q

Here is another interesting LINK!

 

[Poof]

Originally posted by: Smokeball
There was an almost duplicate looking chart that disappeared yesterday because the user changed his name. I thought I'd take a snapshot of this one before it disappeared because of a name change too. :Q

Here is another interesting LINK!

Well... a popular quip I heard just recently was - "They can run but they cannot hide...". And that's because even if they change their name, the Registration Class pages will eventually come up with their new name but the identical number WUs. Which is why identifying which Registration Class they're in is helpful.

 

[Kinguni]

You guys need to do some reading at ARS Technica! We knew about that queue before they did (since 2 of our members use it) and brought it to their attention, after which by looking through the queue logs, 2 machines were discovered pumping out bad WUs. They were taken off-line the next day when David could get at them (since they were off-site).

Berkeley has looked at their accounts and found nothing unusual, as they have with other accounts. Don't you just love a good witch hunt?

Cheers, Kinguni

 

[Evadman]

45 second WU's! I wish I could do that

Lets give them the benifit of the doubt and say it wa a boo-boo. No biggie.

 

[Smoke]

Thanks for pointing that out, Kinguni.

So how many WUs do you think were done that way?

 

[RemyCanad]

Originally posted by: Kinguni
You guys need to do some reading at ARS Technica! We knew about that queue before they did (since 2 of our members use it) and brought it to their attention, after which by looking through the queue logs, 2 machines were discovered pumping out bad WUs. They were taken off-line the next day when David could get at them (since they were off-site).

Berkeley has looked at their accounts and found nothing unusual, as they have with other accounts. Don't you just love a good witch hunt?

Cheers, Kinguni

Witch hunts are fun. So who do I need to stone?

 

[Poof]

Originally posted by: Kinguni
You guys need to do some reading at ARS Technica! We knew about that queue before they did (since 2 of our members use it) and brought it to their attention, after which by looking through the queue logs, 2 machines were discovered pumping out bad WUs. They were taken off-line the next day when David could get at them (since they were off-site).

Berkeley has looked at their accounts and found nothing unusual, as they have with other accounts. Don't you just love a good witch hunt?

Cheers, Kinguni

As of the time of my post right now, I have 4205 posts here, 5018 over on Ars, AND about 750 or so on your own BBR board sweety... How 'bout yerself????

 

[Kinguni]

So how many WUs do you think were done that way?

That we aren't sure of unfortunately, but I personally asked Berkeley to look at it.

 

[Kinguni]

 

[Kinguni]

Originally posted by: PoofAs of the time of my post right now, I have 4205 posts here, 5018 over on Ars, AND about 750 or so on your own BBR board sweety... How 'bout yerself????

Now that I figured out how to quote someone here, I only started reading at ARS when the cheating issue came to light, and make sure that I read every thread and post there on the matter. No insult was intended, only that same had been posted over there and some of the antics there have been a little to dramatic for my liking.

I believe that most of the existing cheaters have been taken care of, but that still leaves them the option of rejoining and doing the same thing over again.

 

[Poof]

Originally posted by: Kinguni

Originally posted by: PoofAs of the time of my post right now, I have 4205 posts here, 5018 over on Ars, AND about 750 or so on your own BBR board sweety... How 'bout yerself????

Now that I figured out how to quote someone here, I only started reading at ARS when the cheating issue came to light, and make sure that I read every thread and post there on the matter. No insult was intended, only that same had been posted over there and some of the antics there have been a little to dramatic for my liking.

I believe that most of the existing cheaters have been taken care of, but that still leaves them the option of rejoining and doing the same thing over again.

Let's put it this way... I am a member of many tech forums. Each one has it's own unique personality and way of going about things. Each has its own community and I try to recognize that and adapt to the environment to which I'm posting.

Because I belong to these different forums and have made friends on all of them, it pains me to see the animosity that pops up between them because in my heart I know that there are more "good" people that post on them then bad.

It is true and pretty obvious that Ars has chosen to take a "lead" on this cheating thing as Arsians have felt that being the #1 in that project gives them enough "pull" to get something done about it. There is "power" that comes with being a top team and I have even seen it wielded here with Dnet, when their projects were the primary focus of Anandtech... And issues that impacted those projects' communities, that needed to be resolved, were resolved.

There are a number of TeAm members here who have quietly been following the threads over on Ars and some have been keeping folks here updated on the happenings. But as you can tell, it is not a critical, drop dead issue here.

Still, the fact that according to threads there, over 9,000,000 results have been purged - that is nothing to sneeze at. And I think if Starfire saw say Team Canada (hypothetically of course - no offense to my Canadian friends... ) suddenly propel itself past them within a month or two and then your team tried to legitimately ramp up to meet the challenge by recruiting, buying more machines and/or borging more machines, and then you find out that TC only got where they were because of a few idiots who were cheating, then I think you would feel a little differently. As you might realize, it was this that sortof got fragile ticked deep down on some emotional level, and he basically pulled out of DC altogether for awhile, later resurfacing on the Free-DC team and now back to crunching for Ars. That "confession" still reverberates almost 2 years later over there It is a powerful thread and IMHO, really reflects the mindset of the underground cheater community. These are the folks who brought you seti303gti, which is STILL out there and is still being used, and SETI never bothered to come out with a 3.04 that could at least try to invalidate the results from it.

Be that as it may, I hope that some good comes out of this and I also hope that every team will deal with their own "in house". I have been saying this for some time. They need to be given the tools to do this, but THEY should be doing the looking and Ars shouldn't have to be the one to initiate that.

I do wish Starfire well and I think it's time for ya'll to kick some KWSN butt!

 

[Smoke]

I too have been doing more reading in other forums since the ?cheating? scandal has surfaced. I must have missed the thread about the ?FAST WUs?. I?d appreciate a link.

These errant computers tend to pop up from time to time. I and other stats-keepers here on TeAm AnandTech are usually on that kind of situation very quickly.

For example, a few weeks ago we had a relatively new member, ?beatmassa?, start putting out a handsome amount of WUs. He ended up in our weekly stats by ?Orange Kid? in the Top Ten!.

I engaged ?beatmassa? in a conversation to congratulate him on his tremendous contribution to The TeAm and also inquired what computers he had at his disposal. It turned out; ?beatmassa? was a 15 year old high school student who had just started running SETI on his Athlon 1.2 GHz machine. He too was very excited about his production and how he was climbing the ranks.

I explained to him that his computer is actually malfunctioning either through OCing or some bad memory and that the WUs he was putting out were actually corrupted and of no use to the Seti@Home project. I also pointed out to him that there have been some people in the past that have had the same problem and we needed to get his computer fixed so it would do an accurate analysis of the WUs. I asked him if he could stop doing SETI for the time being until we figured out where the problem might lie. I explained to him that if he didn?t stop running SETI on the errant computer it might be interpreted by some that he is trying to cheat. Being a very upstanding young fellow he immediately removed SETI from his computer. How S@H will handle his account is still an outstanding issue. The time frame involved was less than three weeks.

I am curious how long David B? and ?Stephen Schmidt? now known as ?lazy? turned in ?Fast WUs? before they were discovered. The drop in production from around 2,000 WUs @ day to the current 300 WUs @ day is quite dramatic. It appears to me that these accounts were putting out tremendous numbers for many months. For instance, ?David B? has averaged 995 WUs @ day since August 12; he has averaged 1,436 WUs @ day since September 18th; and and has averaged 1,668 WUs @ day since October 1st.

 

[Baldy18]

Originally posted by: Kinguni

So how many WUs do you think were done that way?

That we aren't sure of unfortunately, but I personally asked Berkeley to look at it.

I don't think it is that hard to figure out what is going on with the acount of Stephen Schmidt, aka Lazy. He has 65,000 WUs right now at an average of 3hr4min each. That Queue has many of those WUs documented. Here is what I gather out of that queue:

11,416WU@21 min 39 sec
2,860WU@4 min 39 sec
10,340WU@17 min 56 sec
12,092WU@20 min 28 sec
11,925WU@46 min 18 sec
8,296WU@29 min 31 sec
--------------------------------
8WU@11 hr 4 min
1WU@4 hr 1 min
69WU@7 hr 47 min
673WU@7 hr 29 min

Thats roughly 58,000WU. I drew a line for a reason. Look at the 57,000WU that have rediculous averages. Looking at his total of 65,000WUs the undocumented ones would have to be legit to pull up the average from that rediculously low level to the overall 3hr average.

It appears to me that those 2 fritzy computers put out about 57,000 bad WUs before they were discovered and only about 8,000 of those 65,000WUs are legit. Maybe Berkeley can adjust his total for him to reflect a more realistic total and alow him to continue crunching on the account since it was a honest mistake.

 

[Kinguni]

The number might not surprise me, but most, if not all, of the the bad WU's were crunching on DavidB's account. I know that for a period of time though that some of DavidB's production was on lazy's account. Regardless, I myself emailed Berkeley about it so they have the information already, not to mention that TLC forwared it with their list as well.