Infodrom Oldenburg - No SETI@home

This page explains why Infodrom Oldenburg does not join the SETI@home effort to find extraterrestrial intelligences on ones home box.

This is from SETI@home (quote from a friend):

We decided not to make source code available for security reasons and for science reasons as well. We have to have everyone do the exact same analysis, or we can't have any control over our research and be confident in our results. We were also worried that there may be a few people that want to deliberately try to screw up our database and server.
Debian There are some issues we'd like to address:

  • For security reasons we cannot afford using our machines for a project where we are not able to verify the code. Since SETI@home doesn't come in source code form we are unable to verify that the code is doing what it should, i.e. searching for extraterrestrial intelligences. Are you sure it doesn't decode your ssh connection?
  • Security through obscurity is not much security at all, and in fact may encourage people to abuse it, just to prove that it is possible.
  • We cannot afford letting our expensive computing power be used for a project we cannot guarantee that it doesn't cause damage or produce problems otherwise.
  • We cannot afford to let a project use our expensive computing power at no charge for a non-free project.
  • In our opinion it is general misuse if a project, paid by the government and using resources at no charge does not even let participants learn from the system.
  • Infodrom Oldenburg provides several machines of various sizes and architectures. Without source code to compile we cannot make use of it.
  • We want to support free software and software freedom. We don't want to support proprietary software.
  • We cannot support software we are unable to understand and fix in case it is broken, especially when used in non-standard environments.

Joey, 18 May '99