[lug] Seti at home

[Wayde Allen]

On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, Timothy Klein wrote:

> and my Seti at home times-per-work-unit went from time around 25 hours to around
> 7 hours.

I have a really dumb question about Seti at home.  A while back I was curious
about this service and visited their web page.  One thing that seemed
curiously missing for a service that people should volunteer to run on
their home systems was a clear and concise description of the software,
the analyses to be done, the organization responsible for this code, and
especially a guarantee or some degree of assurance that it actually does
what they say it does.  With the current worry about network security I
find it interesting how commonly distributed accross the net this program
is without these kinds of assurances.  I haven't checked their web site
lately so perhaps this has changed, but I guess what I wonder is how do
you know that your machine is really working on Seti data rather than
perhaps chewing on some encryption breaking code?

- Wayde
  (wallen at boulder.nist.gov)