[Editor's note: We have been unable to corroborate this story from GHacks. A search on Google has found there are other reports of this, but they all refer to a forum that no longer corroborates this report. It seems there was — something — but that it is not now visible on their site. See, too, the "Previously" section at the bottom which suggests this story may be in error. Can any Soylentil shed some light on this? --martyb]
SETI@Home's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence comes to an end - gHacks Tech News:
SETI@Home will go into hibernation on March 31, 2020. The distributed computing project was launched in 1999 to analyze data provided by the radio telescope Arecibo in Puerto Rico. Later on, data from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and Parkes Observatory in Australia were added.
SETI@Home -- SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- broke down the signals into packets which it then distributed to connected computer systems. These computer systems, often operated by volunteers from around the world, would then be used to analyze the data and transfer results back to the project.
[...] The project maintainers at UC Berkeley provide two reasons for the decision:
- The project is "at a point of diminishing returns" as it has "analyzed all the data" that is needed "for now".
- Managing the distributed processing of data is a lot of work and time is required to complete the "back-end analysis of the results" that have been obtained already.
Hibernation means that the project is not disappearing from the face of the earth. The project website and forums remain open and the distributed computing resources of SETI@Home may be used by other scientific research projects to focus on areas such as "cosmology or pulsar research". Seti@Home may start distributing work again if that happens and the project team will make an announcement if a new research project has been found.
Previously:
New Technologies, Strategies Expanding Search for Extraterrestrial Life
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Tuesday March 03 2020, @09:15PM (1 child)
SETI was a CIA op designed to crack the heavily encrypted (for the time) password that president Nixon had forgotten, which encrypted the nuclear launch codes and the mutually assured destruction system that has been sitting idle all this time. Poor Nixon had had to fake forgetfulness so much that his subconscious believed himself and actually erased the pass from his mind.
Finally the mutually assured destruction system can be disabled. Little Kim has no idea of what his gimmicks could have resulted in, if he started sending more than 3 rockets at the same time towards the US.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence was a plausible cover up for DSP routines that looked for patterns in apparently random data.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @05:28PM
not true
the launch codes were "00000000" at the time. that only changed when someone wrote about it in a news article. the idea was that complicated numbers would be too hard to remember during a stressful event much like what would happen when anyone wanted to enter that code in to launch something as stressful as that.
i am sure there the article is archived somewhere--along with some snide comments about the 8" diskettes used on the systems one would enter the codes into.
also i think nixon was from space