- Joined
- Jan 9, 2006
We'll take this slow, because:
1) You can't believe it's true, and 2) It's too rich to digest, all at once. 3) It covers one thread with 167 posts in it, and several links to still other threads.
This is the Reader's Digest Version.
There were some cads on the Czech Boinc Team who wanted to get a *LOT* of credits, without doing all that crunching/folding, computer work.
They found and exploited a weakness in the way that BOINC is run, administratively. Specifically, they learned that the Founder of the team, has a lot of power:
1) He can kick anyone off the team he wants to, no reason needed
2) He can re-name the team
3) He can close a team down
4) He can transfer the credits from one team, to another team.
And Barbar and some buds, (the scoundrels), knew how to become the founder of a lot of teams - just initiate a founder change, and if the current founder doesn't refuse it within 60 days, then he could become the new founder!!
There are *hundreds* of BOINC teams with an inactive founder, and Barbar made up long lists of them, and joined them. Shortly thereafter, he put in a request to be the new Founder of that team. You can get a better idea by viewing his website for BOINC:
http://www.barbaruv.czeweb.cz/boinc.php
He then kicked off the other members (who might otherwise object), and took those team's credits/points, and had them transferred to one of his "root" teams he had set up to receive them, without looking suspicious. Eventually, the points wound up generally, in his BOINC team, "Space Family".
In this way they legally "acquired" many millions of points/credits! People who had been working with BOINC projects for years, suddenly found their teams, completely missing or re-named, and they weren't even members any more.
One team of Barbar's, went from 3 million credits to over 25 million credits, in one month, using this technique.
This is the thread on Rosetta's board, but Barbar was active across a large number of BOINC projects, so there are several other threads:
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=4238
Having read through this long thread, I realized *our* Rosetta team, like the Teddies, had an inactive founder. He never folded a single WU, in fact!
I have put in a request to become the Overclocker's.com team founder. First, to prevent the kind of team theft that the Teddies had, and second, to see if we can't get more enthusiasm and growth in our Rosetta team.
P.S. The Teddies team has since been restored. The ability to manipulate teams and points within BOINC, has only partially been addressed.
1) You can't believe it's true, and 2) It's too rich to digest, all at once. 3) It covers one thread with 167 posts in it, and several links to still other threads.
This is the Reader's Digest Version.
There were some cads on the Czech Boinc Team who wanted to get a *LOT* of credits, without doing all that crunching/folding, computer work.
They found and exploited a weakness in the way that BOINC is run, administratively. Specifically, they learned that the Founder of the team, has a lot of power:
1) He can kick anyone off the team he wants to, no reason needed
2) He can re-name the team
3) He can close a team down
4) He can transfer the credits from one team, to another team.
And Barbar and some buds, (the scoundrels), knew how to become the founder of a lot of teams - just initiate a founder change, and if the current founder doesn't refuse it within 60 days, then he could become the new founder!!
There are *hundreds* of BOINC teams with an inactive founder, and Barbar made up long lists of them, and joined them. Shortly thereafter, he put in a request to be the new Founder of that team. You can get a better idea by viewing his website for BOINC:
http://www.barbaruv.czeweb.cz/boinc.php
He then kicked off the other members (who might otherwise object), and took those team's credits/points, and had them transferred to one of his "root" teams he had set up to receive them, without looking suspicious. Eventually, the points wound up generally, in his BOINC team, "Space Family".
In this way they legally "acquired" many millions of points/credits! People who had been working with BOINC projects for years, suddenly found their teams, completely missing or re-named, and they weren't even members any more.
One team of Barbar's, went from 3 million credits to over 25 million credits, in one month, using this technique.
This is the thread on Rosetta's board, but Barbar was active across a large number of BOINC projects, so there are several other threads:
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=4238
Having read through this long thread, I realized *our* Rosetta team, like the Teddies, had an inactive founder. He never folded a single WU, in fact!
I have put in a request to become the Overclocker's.com team founder. First, to prevent the kind of team theft that the Teddies had, and second, to see if we can't get more enthusiasm and growth in our Rosetta team.
P.S. The Teddies team has since been restored. The ability to manipulate teams and points within BOINC, has only partially been addressed.
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