I've taken the liberty of setting up an official folding@home team for Soylent News. In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's.
There is more information on the project here, which explains it much better than I could.
Clients are available for Linux, OSX, and even Windows (if you swing that way), so come join our botnet!
That Other Site's team is ranked at 1817, so we've got some catching up to do.
On a personal note, my Dad carries the gene markers for Huntington's disease, and will eventually succumb to it. Research like this is very helpful for understanding, and hopefully developing treatments for it.
tl;dr Our Soylent News team ID is 230319
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @04:52PM
It's too bad folding@home is proprietary software.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @04:54PM
Yeah, too bad. Could you imagine, helping defeat Alzheimers with proprietary software? Sorry about your failing memory Grandma, but I don't want to lose my brownie points with RMS.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday February 12 2016, @04:57PM
Both granny and RMS eat their own toejam, so perhaps they could get along after all!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @07:42PM
Make sure to give Microsoft and other such corporations lots of money, because rich people donate some of their money to charity. The fact that it does some good does not justify the evil it does by not respecting your freedoms. Your attitude is a race to the bottom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @09:41PM
I like how you read my post, completely disregarded all content contained therein, and then replied to an argument I never made. Good job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @09:48PM
I didn't disregard all the content within. Your point was simply idiotic. You tried to downplay the fact that it's proprietary software by saying that it also does some good things.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 28 2016, @10:59PM
You tried to downplay the fact that it's proprietary software by saying that it also does some good things.
I think the other AC succeeded at that, not merely tried. And your argument was remarkably stupid. Up your game.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by paulej72 on Friday February 12 2016, @05:10PM
Could you imagine someone running a modified version of a theoretical open source version that returned shit data. And that version put up on a sharing site so that it became the dominant version people used. Research would be set back years.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday February 12 2016, @05:59PM
that's not how it works, because scientific software can be compared with multiple data sources.
They exploit the fluffy "screensaver supercomputer" meme, to lower their research costs.
Perhaps, the funding agencies should pro-rate their grants for all the free computer time they are getting?
Pros:
Raising the profile of the use of biophysics to solve complex clinical problems
Cons:
Not raising the actual intellectual level by keeping the "how" secret and focusing on the "how much time can YOU donate?".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @07:26PM
Unfortunately in this case it is about 'cred'. So people would cheat with points. I have seen people cheat over less.
Once the project is done they should release the source so it can be checked and replicated though.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @07:45PM
If people can "cheat" merely because they can see and modify the source code, either your software is poorly designed or having it be proprietary is not going to help one bit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2016, @08:51PM
all software is poorly designed
probably something to do with humans being involved in the process, or something
there might be some 'hello world' implementation that could be considered well designed, but then it probably runs on an operating system that's poorly designed
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday February 13 2016, @05:25AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday February 13 2016, @09:45AM
That's not entirely comparable. When I download a browser, I can trust a signature of the binary (or, when I build from source, the hashes of the git repository). The trust is based on the fact that some more or less high-profile people publish their keys and vouch for the software with their good names.
In an interactive online project with thousands of anonymous participants, the situation is different. If the key is part of the OSS-package, it can be extracted and used to sign falsified data. If the key is generated for each user, there is no base to trust this signature since $evilperson can generate a signature just as valid.
That said, the concept they seem to employ here is security by obscurity, which is usually discouraged. I still think the only solution is to have some other kind of verification for the data.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 13 2016, @12:51PM
The software would still come from a central repository with the maintainers having tight control of what does or does not go into the code. They would certainly not distribute the keys any more than they are distributed for Linux.
I certainly would hope they verify their data. After all, intentional tampering is not the only way the data could get corrupted. The typical way to do this is to send the same work package to several clients, and compare the results. But there may also be checks that are less computationally expensive than doing the complete calculation again. I didn't check what they actually calculate, but if, for example, the algorithm is an iteration converging to the correct solution, then running the iteration step just once should be sufficient to check whether the iteration really converged.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday February 13 2016, @02:41PM
The software would still come from a central repository with the maintainers having tight control of what does or does not go into the code.
... which is a valid argument when you want to protect the user. But not when you want to prevent the user to modify the SW in order to receive higher scores with questionable data.
They would certainly not distribute the keys any more than they are distributed for Linux.
That would be different key of course. The binary is signed by the SW distributor, the returned data might be signed or encrypted by the SW running on the users computer and would need another key for that as well.
I certainly would hope they verify their data. After all, intentional tampering is not the only way the data could get corrupted.
For that a hash sum should suffice.
The typical way to do this is to send the same work package to several clients, and compare the results. But there may also be checks that are less computationally expensive than doing the complete calculation again. I didn't check what they actually calculate, but if, for example, the algorithm is an iteration converging to the correct solution, then running the iteration step just once should be sufficient to check whether the iteration really converged.
Basically my point: Arguing to avoid tempering by keeping the source closed is arguing for security by obscurity, which is wrong. Nevertheless the situation is slightly different from the case where the user is the one being protected, and the arguments need to be refined.
Nitpick: Checking convergence might not be enough, since the user could also just "optimize" his version by running less iterations. But if the algorithms contain operations with properties like e.g. Prime-factorization, as in operation is way more expensive than reverse operation, the check might be simple, safe and cheap.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Saturday February 13 2016, @09:37AM
So the project implements security by obscurity?
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday February 12 2016, @05:56PM
Then sandbox it in a vm. That'd give you better control over the power consumption anyway, if you're the kind of person who cares about it.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this is actually one of the few things that SHOULDN'T be given the opportunity to be forked.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @07:38PM
What would a VM help? I refuse to use software that does not respect my freedoms.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @08:36PM
Anonymous Coward, help! I'm about to be smashed to bits by this car crusher! Quick, pull the lever!
"Now hold on a second, pulling this lever might activate some software I cannot view the source code of. You see, it's important that all software I use respects muh three essential freedumbs: the freedumb to use the software however I wish, for --"
SPLAT
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @09:16PM
Three? [gnu.org] With that said, you're not going to get software that respects your freedoms by mindlessly using proprietary software and letting its developers abuse you. People who simply give up rarely accomplish much of anything.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday February 12 2016, @08:39PM
Well, my suggestion stemmed from not knowing whether the situation was ideological or technical.
Sounds like it won't help you though, in this case.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday February 12 2016, @09:25PM
That's strange, isn't it?
Especially since the underlying software is mostly open source or public domain or "your scientific article must quote our software" kind of licenses.
ISTR that folding@home used GROMACS [wikipedia.org], from the University of Groningen, for some of their molecular modelling.
Can't be bothered to find its primary download site now, so I quote from the Wikipedia (BE WARNED! verify for yourself):
Maybe the found that GROMACS was lacking a screen-saver, and tacked a proprietary screen-saver on?
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday February 12 2016, @09:29PM
(replying to meself)
I said, "that's strange", because it implies that folding@home utilizes about 25 years of Dutch Government coffee, cigarettes, and mainframe CPU time subsidies, and PhD salaries (what I estimate was the cost to construct GROMACS). And then they make it proprietary:-( What do the Grunningers think of this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @09:38PM
What do the Grunningers think of this?
Folding@home has been granted a non-commercial, non-GPL license for Gromacs,
I don't think they care.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Saturday February 13 2016, @04:38AM