Re: Folding@Home Package
On Sun, Jun 24, 2007 at 05:51:29PM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
> As I understood it, the idea was more to keep information *comparable*,
> which wouldn't be the case if someone "improved" the script by using a
> faster minimizer, linking against an improved libfoo or whatever. You
> simply cannot publish a work based on "input which clients sent to us
> that are somehow more or less the same as what we describe in the
> methods section", it needs to match exactly what's in the methods
> section. It's not a means against evil attackers, but against
> goodwilling "helpers".
Josselin is right here, being closed source does not protect against
these kind of problems _AT ALL_. We're running a BOINC project that runs
a closed source application, but that did not prevent a guy with some
free time to dissassemble the code and produce a binary patch to speed
up the program in order to gain more credits.
There is ongoing research about how to make public distributed computing
more reliable and tampering more detectable, but being closed source does
not help at all.
Gabor
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MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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