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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#61

Post by _yb2s »

fsckboy wrote: post #25

I don't specifically miss SETI@home as much as I miss the spirit of the internet back then, the "what will they think of next!?" The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Now computers are so complex and task heavy and fraught with problems it seems like more hassle than it's worth. I liked when wondering "why is my machine so slow", that…

Power and cooling were at fixed levels and computers couldn’t really sleep, so cpu cycles were just wasted without seti@home. Nowadays computers idle efficiently, so something like that would make your computer louder and more expensive to run.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#62

Post by shmoe »

fsckboy wrote: post #25

I don't specifically miss SETI@home as much as I miss the spirit of the internet back then, the "what will they think of next!?" The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Now computers are so complex and task heavy and fraught with problems it seems like more hassle than it's worth. I liked when wondering "why is my machine so slow", that…

distributed.net ftw.. those truly were the days.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#63

Post by peterleiser »

LinuxBender wrote: post #8
jasongill wrote: post #2

Wow, this is sad. I remember when this project was released in 1999 - we installed it on all the workstations in our office in an effort to be the first to find ET. Loved bragging about the cool graph, saying it could be an alien signal. Sad to see the project come to an end, even if it was the distant precursor to things like BitTorrent and Bitcoin

We did that as well on a bunch of spare Sun SPARC servers that were considered powerful back in their day. A part of me always wondered if I had been tricked into cracking encryption for the assorted agencies and that this had nothing to do with monitoring the quietest frequency in the galaxy.

Lol! I worked for SETI@home as an undergrad. If something nefarious was going on then my coworkers were extremely good actors, right down to faking an entire codebase and a database filled with processed work units. Hey, I'd probably be suspicious of SETI too if I hadn't worked for SETI. Cheers!

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#64

Post by paulpauper »

I think it's time to retire it for good. In the 90s and early 2000s it was cool but I think has sorta faded into irreverence. I don't think it was ever useful or qualified as science for that matter. I think a better approach is to determine if it's mathematically possible for such a signal to exist in the first place. SETI makes a lot of assumptions which may be wrong.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#65

Post by bee_rider »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #41
sizzle wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folding@Home was something I ran instead of mining bitcoin at the time, it really made me feel fulfilled, but alas here I am without my crazy bitcoin money because I rather fold proteins to solve diseases back then hah

I did bitcoin but used it for beer money. RIP the 150 or so coins I mined.

This is where most of my “what if” thoughts about Bitcoin go. I heard about it when it was pretty cheap — I want to say single digit dollars, but it was a while ago.

But if I’d have gotten into it at the time, I surely would have decided “it’ll never go higher” around $200 at most.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#66

Post by chungy »

hot_gril wrote: post #54
chungy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has nothing to do with "cracking SHA256 hashes", for what it's worth. The only thing remotely related is how it brute-forces inputs until it generates hashes that begin with a certain number of bits set to 0.

It's continually testing the strength of SHA256. If you can find a way to even partially crack it, you win money. Edit: Also, way more hashes are happening all the time now, increasing the chance that someone finds a collision if it were possible.

That's still not what the Bitcoin miners are doing. They're manipulating inputs, trillions of times a second, just to match a "magic" target for a SHA256 hash starting with a certain number of bits set to 0.

Cracking hashes would imply that they're taking pre-existing hashes and reversing them to find the input.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#67

Post by rurp »

TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #58
fsckboy wrote: post #25

I don't specifically miss SETI@home as much as I miss the spirit of the internet back then, the "what will they think of next!?" The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Now computers are so complex and task heavy and fraught with problems it seems like more hassle than it's worth. I liked when wondering "why is my machine so slow", that…

The recent neural network "revolution" is giving me those vibes, even though it'll ironically kill the old internet with the upcoming spam bots.

If it were based on open ended tooling that anyone interested could experiment freely with, I would feel the same. Unfortunately these giant LLMs are almost the complete opposite of that.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#68

Post by hot_gril »

chungy wrote: post #66
hot_gril wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's continually testing the strength of SHA256. If you can find a way to even partially crack it, you win money. Edit: Also, way more hashes are happening all the time now, increasing the chance that someone finds a collision if it were possible.

That's still not what the Bitcoin miners are doing. They're manipulating inputs, trillions of times a second, just to match a "magic" target for a SHA256 hash starting with a certain number of bits set to 0. Cracking hashes would imply that they're taking pre-existing hashes and reversing them to find the input.

Hashes have multiple requirements for security. You're talking about only one facet, which is that you cannot be given a hash and produce a matching input without consulting a rainbow table (I think there's a term for this, I forget it though).

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#69

Post by porknubbins »

_yb2s wrote: post #61
fsckboy wrote: post #25

I don't specifically miss SETI@home as much as I miss the spirit of the internet back then, the "what will they think of next!?" The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Now computers are so complex and task heavy and fraught with problems it seems like more hassle than it's worth. I liked when wondering "why is my machine so slow", that…

Power and cooling were at fixed levels and computers couldn’t really sleep, so cpu cycles were just wasted without seti@home. Nowadays computers idle efficiently, so something like that would make your computer louder and more expensive to run.

I’m probably about median age for HN and when I was looking into folding Seti@home I had no idea and didn’t worry about power cost because it was subsidised by my parents or university. Plus energy was cheaper then. Now as an adult seeing a month of a few GPUs running on the utility bill really hurts.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#70

Post by SECProto »

hot_gril wrote: post #57
bitcoinistrash wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Hasn’t changed that much. Here we are in 2023 where most of this distributed power goes to cracking sha 256 hashes. Just for speculation and profit instead of leaderboards.

Yeah, cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt today to the spirit of the old internet.

> cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt today to the spirit of the old internet

Cryptocurrency feels like the exact opposite of the old internet to me - it feels like a bunch of anonymous bros looking for the next sucker to scam out of money and get rich quick.

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