Crackpot or Serious Threat - You Judge

Doing some reading over at "SlashDot" and came across this article:

http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/11/28/1254249.shtml?tid=160&tid=172&tid=1

For ease of reading here are the links to a couple of the reference pieces:

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,16559,1650296,00.html

http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/SETI/SETI_Hacker.htm

Not personally trying to say anything one way or the other, it's just that this is the first time I have come across a viewpoint like this.

Respectfully
SkyHook

Definitely crackpot!

There's actually morons who buy insurance against alien abduction! He must be one of them.

We analyze signals that we fit into a certain framework (frequency and form)... In a sense, it is like drawing a picture of a pizza; then expecting to eat it and have it not taste like paper it is drawn on...

Hopefully this analolgy is conveying my thoughts and not just communicating inarticulate drivel...

Ohhhh.....Good analogy!!!!

Fits the situation perfectly!

Larry

Well put Morpheus!

sir_LOIN said:

There's actually morons who buy insurance against alien abduction! He must be one of them.

Click to expand...

Looool that makes me want to open my own insurance company.

Hamm3r said:

Well put Morpheus!



Looool that makes me want to open my own insurance company.

Click to expand...

heh, yeah! have people pay you money every month, in fear of being abducted by Aliens.

the great thing is, i doubt that they would EVER get abducted.

and in the small, tiny, near non-existant chance that they DO get abducted....they have to somehow PROVE that they did get abducted. heheh.

Its the perfect legal insurance scam.

It would be like selling flood insurance to people who live in the desert.

zexmarquies01 said:

....It would be like selling flood insurance to people who live in the desert.

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Actually we do get pretty good floods here in the desert, and nearly every time it rains good. It just does not last long

WOW DUDE. no swearing. don't do that kind of stuff okay man?

we need a mod here...

1. We need to worry about aliens hacking us about as much as we need to worry about an alien war fleet razing our solar system entirely. Only complete nut cases worry about things like that. Its not worth worrying about. There'd be nothing we could do if it happened.

2. The signal coming from the S@H radio telescope is data, not code. An alien would have to know the exact workings of S@H to be able to make data that would do anything harmful.

3. The most harmful thing you could do to a S@H client by feeding it bad data would be to crash the client.

4. Writing a virus and sending it across millions of lightyears without error checking is an entirely impossible task.

5. If alien hackers were advanced enough to do the impossible and execute malicious code by sending bad data to a radio telescope, why not just blow up the earth? Or the solar system? Or the galaxy?

6. Finally, SETI@HOME was founded 1999. It is doubtful that there are aliens living within 7 lightyears of us.

Good points Pie-rate.