On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 12:35 PM, Thom Yorke/RABN Horse <xxxstallionsrhott@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for your prompt response, David.

I appreciate the quick rundown of the stats programs, with which I've become familiarised, and I've been informed by the admins at BOINC that it is supposed to work how you say. However, OBC is stating that he cannot rejoin the team(s) and is locked out of his account. Furthermore, he states that he did not remove any, let alone all 700+ members of the team, one by one, until there were none left. In addition, I tried using this same method, with permission from my team, via PrimeGrid, and the software prevented me from doing so. I also tried the same at Collatz Conjecture and failed to reproduce the results of the sabotage. Therefore, this represents a weakness in the system that is easily exploited via a backdoor method around the security features that you and others designed.

In this case, the backdoor method of which I am speaking, and which any potential saboteur can currently use on SETI and some other projects, is stealthily or brute-forcing his/her way to foundership, Rosetta has disabled this feature, as have many other projects. Back to the point(s): Once the saboteur has assumed foundership using tactical force, he removes credits by zeroing out the team members and then quitting the team so that the team is 'ghosted', and thereby the team is not reflected in the stats uploads the next time they are exported. As you may or may not see, "ASET", which is what the hacker renamed our team, is not reflected in any stats sites even though it has 15m plus credits. Cleverly, (s)he locked OBC out of the group and thus OBC, the true and original founder, is incapable of rejoining the team and undoing the damage via the method you described, even though he is willing to do so if given the opportunity, or if any of our team members are given the opportunity.

So here's how it was hacked, using your template (highlighting the weakness which you had tried to prevent using other parts of the BOINC program):

-hacker gains access to team foundership utilising whatever means (s)he used and removes all members of team
- hacker was unable to delete team since it had credits (15,000,000)
-hacker secreted the credits so that they were unreportable and exist in a ghosted part of SETI's database
-hacker changed the team's name, quit the team, and left a skeleton whereby the real founder cannot now rejoin since the team is "not accepting new members" - (s)he made sure to check that box to complete the job on the way out.
-OBC cannot rejoin the team, since it has 0 members and is not accepting new members, so it is stuck in limbo and needs to be unstuck to allow new members.

Clearly this is a case of sabotage, and will only encourage saboteurs if left in its current state. I cannot imagine that this is acceptable to you, nor is it what you want, nor is it what was envisioned by the founders of BOINC when coming up with a way to reward and encourage participation and volunteerism. I hope you are not telling me that this is repeatable behaviour which is going to be encouraged further by inaction.

I only wish it were as simple as OBC rejoining the team, as he is willing to do so, but is prevented from rejoining. He pledges full cooperation if given the opportunity, and is also willing to delegate that responsibility to me or any other reputable member of our team.

Please keep in mind, though we're not trying to throw our 'weight' around, that we are amongst the top teams. It is quite dispiriting and against all form of fair play and sportsmanship for this to happen to a high-profile team via an attack which is most likely politically or religiously motivated. Statistical terrorism is both unsportsmanlike behaviour as well as unscientific, and should not be ignored in this case, or it will encourage further sabotage and hacking. If I were the unethical type, I could probably reproduce this method, rename a top-ranked team to RDFRS, steal the credits of L'Alliance Francophone or some other top-ranked team, and be done with my problem and pass it along to someone else. Sure it would cause an uproar, but it wouldn't be my problem. Is this how we want things to progress?

I understand the way you've explained it, but the crux of my question is not the past, but what can we do about it now that the damage is done? OBC cannot rejoin, and thus the solution is not simple in this case. We only want what we've earned--nothing more, nothing less. I realise that many would not care if the whole system of credits disappeared tomorrow, but I respectfully and forcefully disagree, as time and time again this element of competitiveness, when not taken to extremes, leads to higher levels of participation and thus more volunteerism, more contribution to scientifically worthy causes, and is basically the only way for volunteers to earn a token of appreciation for their work. Hopefully this is not too much to ask. If it can happen to our team, it can happen to any team, and that renders the whole competition meaningless, does it not?

I believe it would be in our best interest, both from volunteers' perspective as well as that of BOINC and project managers, that our situation be rectified, publicly. Otherwise, this will only encourage the mean-spirited, opportunistic, unscientific, unsportsmanlike, and obscene to follow the new recipe which has been introduced to wreak havoc. You've clearly improved the software from previous versions and tried to install failsafes, and clearly this is a new method of attack. Are you capable of closing this security breach, or are we all to crunch with the possibility that the team we've worked to develop over years could be wiped out in a single day with a single act of destruction by an unethical hacker? Should SETI.USA, L'AF, and other top teams be looking over their shoulder? I know I'm a lone voice here, but I guarantee that if it happened to one of those teams the level of discussion may not be as calm or reasoned. Please help us, and demonstrate to the community that security breaches to BOINC software are something which you will not tolerate.

Respectfully yours,

StandardbredHorse


On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 11:31 AM, David Anderson <davexxx@kingothemountaindotcom> wrote:

here's how things work:

- a team founder can remove any or all members of a team.
- a team founder can delete the team if it has no members
- no credit is every removed from a team
- a team founder can administer a team (e.g. change its name)
only if they are a member of it.

In this case, OBC can rejoin the team, rename it,
and then all the members can rejoin it was well.

-- David


Thom Yorke/RABN Horse wrote:

Hello David,
I have heard many good things about you as the progenitor, or one of the progenitors of the BOINC project as a whole, a contributor to SETI and perhaps other projects, and as a 'guru' of sorts when it comes to BOINC. I hope you can help me with my problem. Brevity is not my strong point, so I will give it a go, as I understand you like things to be brief--it's a complex problem, and hopefully a simple solution.
I believe you have been briefed by Ageless, a forum moderator at the BOINC forums, so you may already have a basic understanding of the situation. A family member of mine was in the hospital for weeks, so as my team's appointed leader, I have failed in getting the task accomplished quickly, but I'd like to finish now if I can. I need some good news.
Recently, there has been some inappropriate behaviour and unintended use of the team functionality regarding stats compilation and database manipulation by who we believe to be a hacker. This was in regards to the statistics compilation for RDFRS, or the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science--a team which we have built from the ground up since 2005, one cobblestone at a time, exponentially building to be a populist powerhouse, 750 members strong and among the top teams overall and on each individual BOINC project. Ageless has taken the time to research original Team IDs in the SETI project as well as to follow our team's message board, and this issue unfortunately affects the SETI. Einstein and LHC projects. Through quick action by both myself and project admins, Rosetta and other projects were able to avert the vandalism before it occurred and/or before the databases updated and uploaded to the stats sites. We had a diverse group of founders, so it is just these several projects that have been affected.
In the software, you have tried to prevent vandalism and sabotage by writing in code which prevents a team founder from kicking active members off of a team which has accumulated credit. Unfortunately, someone has found a way to circumvent the protection you built in via a backdoor method which has now been published on the BOINC forums and is ready to be used again by the next saboteur. I fear not only for the statistical compilation, which provides motivation for many a cruncher, but also for the possible integrity of the databases for each individual project. A wave of vandalism, sabotage and subterfuge awaits inaction by BOINC.

To resummarise briefly, someone, on 2 separate occasions, used their power (whether legitimately or illegitimately obtained) as team "founder" to deactivate/kick off members of our team who had accumulated credit--a supposedly impossible feat. The saboteur removed team members one by one, then renamed the team to a gibberish name, leaving a multimillion (approx. 15,000,000 credits/cobblestones) team in shambles creditwise. On or around 27-Apr-2010 (though probably done on 25-Apr, as SETI's db was down for maintenance), here is the result from SETI, with our original Team ID: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=129421 .This happened with the same saboteur at Einstein@home <mailto:Einstein@home> on or around 25-Apr 2010. Over 10,000,000 credits were lost on that occasion. The same happened at project LHC@home <mailto:LHC@home> at about the same time. In all three cases, the same saboteur was at fault and used the same method: removing all team members, both active and past, leaving the founder as the only team member and then renaming the team (with millions of credits, since they could not delete the team) to a nonsensical name, thus circumventing the protective coding you and others built into the BOINC software. This backdoor method has now been published for all to see at the BOINC forum at a thread which I believe you briefly visited: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=5493

Temporarily, we (Ageless, other forum mods, my team and myself) believe this can be fixed by merging the old team ID with new ones that were created by RDFRS team members who were anxious to restart the team in some form, even if it was from 'scratch', i.e., 0 credits. I would like to exercise this option if possible. However, on a permanent basis, I'd also like to prevent it from occurring to my or any other team. In the spirit of fair play and friendly competition representing and quantifying scientific advancement in the form of token representation of our individual and collective contribution, which I believe to be the foundation of the cobblestone system, we'd like to see the system be preserved as intended and such a situation be prevented in the future by preventing a team from being renamed without the consensus of a group in question, i.e., not unilaterally and with deleterious motives, and particularly for such a large and productive group. In all cases, the saboteur took the pseudonym "Obscured By Clouds". If you are interested, I can include chat transcripts where the actual member named OBC (a legitimate and respected member of our forum who is willing to cooperate in any way possible) denies purposeful subterfuge and claims innocence, stating it must have been a hacker. I can provide links to our team's forum, as can Ageless, who is very familiar with our plight. Nobody on our team is aware of any reason why this may have occurred despite rigorous and thorough questioning of all team founders. We believe it to be the work of a malicious hacker who somehow gained access to the database to undermine a team based on a political or religious reason. The integrity of a database is almost holy in the world of science, and if a hacker has gained access to the stats database, who is to say that (s)he has not gained access to other areas?

We would like our credits reinstated. We are one of the top 100 teams, and in some projects one of the top 10 teams, and we consistently rank under #100 in many projects. Please note the dates in question in graph form at: http://boincstats.com/stats/boinc_team_graph.php?pr=bo&id=133060 <http://boincstats.com/stats/boinc_team_graph.php?pr=bo&id=133060> where we plummeted from over 73 million total credits to just over 50 million in less than 2 days.

We understand a similar situation happened to SETI.USA and was resolved, and we would like to get our situation resolved similarly. Please reinstate our credits and merge our teams using the team IDs which have already been determined through detective work on the respective forum(s).
If you need any further supporting evidence that this was not an 'inside job', a purposeful renaming, or any other information that may assist you in investigating and rectifying the problem, please feel free to email me and/or work with the forum mods who are familiar with our case. We have full stats, chat transcripts with OBC including PMs to OBC as founder, and all other supporting evidence. You have our entire team of over 750 members (currently 550 due to ~200 members still unaware they are not crunching for RDFRS as well as retirees) at your disposal, with me as spokesperson and BOINC mods and developers from SETI and other projects also at your service. While we do not want to take an inordinate amount of time away from your important scientific work, we believe this issue to be relevant enough *to* the furtherment of said scientific work that you'll perhaps be willing to invest the relatively small time by giving your go-ahead and any expertise you have in 1) reinstating our team and 2) preventing the situation from happening again via small changes to the software (having already been made by certain project admins), action(s) without which could unfortunately perhaps unleash a flood of complaints and pandemonium from other teams affected; it takes only several weeks once published for saboteurs to gain an advantage on developers now that the backdoor stats undermining method is published. Please help to preempt by showing that BOINC and its projects will not tolerate such behaviour from anyone and is being proactive in preventing such vandalous acts, and please help to maintain the fun competitive spirit of the stats comps.
I thank you for any help you can give. Again, my apologies, but a personal emergency kept me from following up more immediately. However, Ageless and a small group of BOINC/SETI devs has already done much of the work in determining what it may take to reinstate us. They just need the go-ahead from you to initiate action. I beg of you to please rectify this situation not only for RDFRS, but for the health of the BOINC system overall.
Again, any information you could possibly need is only an email or forum post away. I and my team anxiously await your response.
Thanks and best regards,
Mic Morose, Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science

I've received a lot of PMs, so I know many of you are watching with keen interest from the sidelines, waiting to see how all this will play out. If possible, could some of you kindly lend your public opinions and support, if not for my team then on behalf of your team in terms of what will happen when it becomes open season on teams via the hijack squads?

Many of you are rightly proud of your contributions, and do it for the science first and foremost, but also are keenly aware of statistics compilations and where your team stands in them, down to being able to quote your exact position in BoincStats or your favourite site. I have been PM'd by some top-rank teams expressing concern and support, which I have greatly appreciated, and I'd also appreciate it if some of you stood by me/my team publicly here in the forum if you feel supportive. If you feel antipathy towards my pursuit, by all means, let's have a discussion here. If you support me, my team, and our plight, then let's send an audible message that as a community we will not stand idly by while these hackers make a mockery of our friendly numerical sport.

What's happening to RDRFS is a travesty; we've been slowly but exponentially building since 2005, and I know that many of your teams are doing well too. Can you imagine waking up one day or checking in to see whether you've passed that team you've been waiting months to pass and finding out that your one token reward system that represents your donated unused CPU cycles, your team pride, your milestones, and all your (admittedly non-monetary and consumable) plaudits disappeared overnight in one fell swoop? I'd like to hear some further opinions.

Thank you to all those who've already expressed support, and also help (i.e., Ageless in detective work despite antipathy towards the credit system overall), but I'd like to build a consensus here, and now is the time. If it were any of your teams, even if I were deadlocked in a #1 vs. #2 race with you, I'd express my support, as any sense of 'competition' would be cheapened and my team's lead, if gained by subterfuge (whether caused by my team or by an outside force such as a hacker, saboteur, lone wolf, disgruntled, 'gone postal' member, etc.) would be hollow and meaningless. Yeah, I know, melodramatic, but y'know what? This is more than just 'crunching' and I know that, judging from the team names, traffic to the stats websites, and posts from individual team forums regarding things like 'project of the month' and such things that there is a lot of pride in yourselves for amassing cobblestone credits. Won't you help a fellow team out who's been sabotaged by lending a word of support and perhaps some guidance to me in terms of how to best approach David's somewhat icy and terse responses? As if I didn't know how credits work.

Big up to you, David, for your work and dedication to scientific endeavours, but I don't like being placated, pandered to, and my detailed and impassioned pleas dismissed out-of-hand with inadequate, half-hearted, brusque responses--personality and communication style aside. What do you really think? Did you hear what I said? You don't have to write a bunch, but man, can ya crack that noggin just a little? I'm not going to pussyfoot around an issue just because you've done great things in your time. No offense intended, but man...show a little love for your volunteers, without whom your little project would remain just that. I know you get flustered by what seems like a distraction, but since the days of the little green antenna in the systray, stats have played an integral role in quantifying our relative contributions, and whether you like it or not (unless some dictatorial decree is passed down) it will remain that way. I did not spend all this time and effort for three sentences telling me I'm SOL or tell OBC to rejoin the team and manually add it back in. Let's say he did do it--ya think he's really going to undo it? But since he didn't, give me answers, don't restate the problem for me--I know what the problem is. I need solutions.

Any support, solutions, creativity, rah-rah, debate, criticism, whatever is preferred to silence and dismissal. We want redress, we've done our investigation, and it's time for action that's beyond our means but perhaps within your scope. If you can't do it, fine. If you can, as I said, you have all our team and our resources and collective knowledge at your disposal. I leave it at that for tonight, I'm about to go graze and chill with the studz, marez, and geldofs.

Peace to all...David, Ageless, everyone on the forum...have a fantastic evening, here's to whinnying at ya on the morrow.

Standardbred Horse

Sh*t. Of course my edit button disappears 5 mins after David resets the thing and notifies me via email. There's still work to be done and questions to be answered. What about Einstein and LHC? How do we integrate the two team IDs to avoid name conflicts?

My apologies for any comments made out of frustration at what seemed like noncommital responses. We'll see how far this gets overnight and what the response is like via our board. OBC is cooperative and I'm waiting for an answer on whether I can get foundership so as to take the lead in renaming and getting the orig team back on track, all 15m credits.

Still named "ASET", but will figure out what to do tomorrow.

Thanks to all, I gotta go do my hospital duty. Been stressing, a VIP to me is in some cancer situation and...OK it's my spouse. So...it is what it is.

Will whinny back at ya tomorrow.

S. Horse

*whinnies and hears his own voice echo back to his pricked ears*

I feel like I'm nickering to myself here.

As an update: I was able to join team "ASET" and have contacted OBC; awaiting response. My communiques are a bit delayed due to *still* having a loved one in the hospital, but I'm working diligently on this every day even a bit at a time (10-20 mins or so). I requested foundership and let OBC know if he's able to log in to please transfer that to me--he's uninterested in being founder 1) due to the hullaballoo and 2) has shifted priorities from BOINC and into a new venture, among other reasons. So...I don't wanna have to wait until June 5th.

If someone here could make me founder, I will fix the team by renaming, as that is within the power right now. On my team's forum, I have been given explicit public permission to assume the role (by OBC).

I don't know who has fingers in Einstein's and LHC pies, but I'll need help there too. I don't run either program and am not a member. A RDFRS member named "Stuart" (a trusted member and founder of a number of our projeects) is in charge of the new team there, I believe (going off memory) but the same issue applies with the old team ID and the new one needing a merge.

Thanks to anyone/everyone who can provide help and/or guidance from this point forward. Who do I need to contact at 1) SETI to make me admin if OBC can't, 2) Einstein and LHC to merge Team IDs.

Thanks again,

Standardbred Horse

While I symphathize with your plight, I think that your constant verbose posts are putting people off reading them. We are, after all, just volunteers, with a life outside of computers.

You'll need to contact the project people at each of the affected projects to get them to do something about restoring group ownership & credits. This includes SETI, as this site at which you're posting is NOT SETI.
Some people posting here may know the contact details for those at some of the other projects.

Good luck.

Gotcha Les, and thanks. I prefer "nuanced and comprehensive" to "verbose" (we'll leave "constant" aside for a moment, as I hope that wasn't meant as a sideswipe; however, to address that briefly, each post has pertinent information w/updates, new info, etc.), but you made your point ;) Different people have different communication/writing styles, as do men and women, etc. etc., so I don't believe it to be a fault of mine, just a personal style. Thanks for the feed bag, though--I'll see what I can do to conform my message to its audience.

I realise this is not the SETI site, but since 1) I believed, and in many respects still believe, there to be a problem re: BOINC software and its susceptibility to this form of hacking, I'd like there to be a change made to the software and/or protocol as necessary re: teams, foundership, and stats that could be implemented across projects from a central point vs. making 50 different requests at each project, and thus consider this an appropriate forum in which to make my case/request, and 2) this is/was a cross-project problem so rather than making my "constant verbose" posts in each forum, I had hoped to get it all done here--"one stop shopping", if you will--and I understand there are people here that can make that happen.

I'll keep it brief and end here, but essentially that's why.

Thanks,
StandardbredHorse

Gee aren't I glad I'm just me and I'm the only one I have to argue with, and believe me I have enough problems with no data and no uploads and downloads to keep me frustrated.
I'd much rather be just me, doing what I want, to being part of a mob doing what it wants.
Chees MaxG.

In a way, I do agree with Les, you do tend to ramble. But on the other hand I have been following this thread with interest. I hope you are able to get this problem solved not only for your own team but to keep it from happening to others.

Hi Standard,

I hope all goes well for you, and I hope this situation gets resolved suitably.

I've been following this thread with interest and I believe this is probably the best place to make your cross-boinc posts. I like more info rather than less - but perhaps that's just me.

kinhull

---

JOIN Team ACC

In a way, I do agree with Les, you do tend to ramble. But on the other hand I have been following this thread with interest. I hope you are able to get this problem solved not only for your own team but to keep it from happening to others.

Thanks for your opinion, perryjay, and to an extent, I can agree. Keep in mind, however, that I have been suffering from extreme sleep deprivation due to my dragged-out family emergency, with the hospital stay now going over a week. Not to make excuses, because I am always pretty wordy, but normally am a little more succinct or at least on-point and sharp. I can't really change my "comprehensive and nuanced" style, though. Sometimes the cause of communication problems is incompleteness of a conveyed thought, though there is a fine line between 1) being thorough and arguing a point from many angles, even if lengthy, and 2) simply restating yourself with no new information (although restating/repeating can serve a purpose when you are trying to hammer a point home that is either not getting through or has gone unacknowledged.

With all sincerity, I appreciate your post and thoughtful comment (I like that you made it without dripping sarcasm and insincerity), will try to be careful while still maintaining my style and being 'real', and appreciate not only your interest from a sympathetic point of view but also for recognising that this can and will happen again and it could be any team next.

FYI re: the latest update, I've been AWOL for a day or two from here; my last email to dev/David was 2 days ago, however, and I was given explicit permission to assume foundership of the original team in an email CC'd to all by the founder stating that he 1) still cannot log into the account although still listed as founder (am assuming the hacker changed the orig PW); he needs to do that in order to be able to approve the foundership transfer to me, and 2) he is very sorry for the initial problem but did not protect his PW very carefully and that's what allowed the hacker to gain access and do such thorough damage, which until David intervened was unreversible, and unless one more step of intervention is taken, will leave our team unrecoverable until early June (assuming that the hacker has not left themsel(ves) a back door to prevent restoration). That's the latest...I'm hoping to email and get the foundership transfer done manually by SETI admin/personnel because that's how we prevented problems at Rosetta and thwarted the same hacker before he finished screwing up that project.

Take care for now,

StandardbredHorse

Hi Standard,

I hope all goes well for you, and I hope this situation gets resolved suitably.

I've been following this thread with interest and I believe this is probably the best place to make your cross-boinc posts. I like more info rather than less - but perhaps that's just me.

kinhull

Kinhull,

Sorry I missed your reply earlier. As a total non-topical aside, I have a horse named Kin :o)

I appreciate the well-wishes, and also the support on the relevance of our problem/this topic to the BOINC-wide forum here as well as on my posting style - see, I know that many people here are more math- than verbal-oriented, or consider themselves too busy to read more than a couple of sentences, preferably shortened with military-style abbreviations if at all possible to keep the character count to a bare minimum and the cerebral investment at a low level. It's good to know that I can expound a little bit without being universally deplored and publicly dressed down for excess verbosity. Sure, I realise there is a time for quick and brief responses (which I do accordingly), but there are also times when I can and should be free to post something of moderate length and converse a little bit with friendly people while conveying some information at the same time. I don't think a 3-minute read is too much, especially when I'm responding to a few posts at once and trying to explain a complex situation without leaving out what might be an important detail. Hopefully those who don't have the inclination or time to read the post will come back to it when they do. A request for help is a request for help. A follow-up request should be honoured as well. I will make it clear when I need help, when I'm giving a status update and saying 'hi' to new friends, when it's a mixture, and above all, I believe I belong here just as much as anyone else does.

What texting and email (wonderful and powerful tools, but with which it's very easy to entrap people in linguistic purgatory) has done to the English language is deplorable. I'll keep it brief here, because whole books have been written on the topic, but between the social conditioning that texting has imbued in the population and the contant barrage of information that some people can filter better than others, we've kind of devolved as a species for the first time when it comes to language. One rule of the brain is "use it or lose it", and many have begun to lose the neural pathways built over eons of evolution. Immersing yourself in short posts is like...like...are you old enough to remember those anti-drug commercials in the 80s, with the fried egg? :o) Soon you become addicted to those short bursts of incomplete information and are overwhelmed by even normal words, let alone those which may contain any hint of nuance or anything but base utilitarian thought transmission. Only 'professionals' are supposed to engage in such practices, and even then within acceptable limits and usually confined to the audience of other 'professionals'. But alas, again I digress...

No, I don't think it's just you, though you do stand out in your brave admission of preferring comprehensiveness. The other extreme would be people who post and say they're having a problem, but don't elucidate it well enough for anyone to solve or are unable to find the words or time to express the problem, and this creates a burst of post exchanges which in aggregate wind up being longer than if the OP had just written enough information in the first place. That's one of my pet peeves, so I guess there's people on both sides, and there's a happy medium in there somewhere, so by conceding that I can sometimes go overboard, I'll try to aim for that median territory to keep everyone happy.

It's the weekend now, so I imagine things will slow down a bit, and I'll be wrapped up with my personal/family/health issue for hours at a time, but I will wait another day or so and then send another brief request for foundership transfer if OBC is still locked out, and at the same time will begin the campaign at LHC and Einstein, at which nothing has been done because those projects deferred to SETI, forwarded me here to the BOINC forums, and are awaiting the resolution to the problem. Interestingly, the project managers also pointed out possible improvements in the BOINC software. I'll have to find which project, perhaps it is Rosetta, but one of them disabled team foundership transfer requests altogether, giving a message such as 'sorry, but this feature has been disabled due to abuse; please email project admin with any requests and your request will be evaluated'. Therefore, I'm apparently not the only one who's noticed that there's a problem and it's probably bigger than the RDFRS team, and it's a BOINC-wide problem because the software attempted to address it in earlier versions, but the method used by the RDFRS hacker is at least one workaround to the developer's coding. I commend them for making an attempt, and hope they follow through in the next version by closing any possible loopholes by making it harder to simply kick off members and rename a team, then quit that team so it has 0 members and is unreportable and thus invisible to the stats sites, relegated to obscurity on a given project's database under a gibberish name. As someone stated earlier in this thread, why would you need to ever kick anyone off of a team - what, are there production/crunching quotas now? :) I guess that would be one suggestion--to close off the ability to kick people off the team, though that seems like a drastic measure, and I know the developers here are much more skilled and creative and can come up with a way to stop this vandalism without punishing legitimate team founders from having near-complete freedom over their team. It's just that when you get into the hundreds of members and millions of credits, it changes the rules just a bit; that's more than just a small group of homies coming together and crunching (sorry, just heard that MC Frontalot's supposedly coming out with some fresh nerdcore, lol..and no, that's a self-conscious lol, not an 'I think I'm funny' lol).

Hopefully the forum realises the tongue-in-cheek nature of the post, and that I don't respond to criticism with ad-hom attacks or being driven into a rage, I just stay cool, do what I do, and continue to transmit updates as they occur. Right now I'm in a holding pattern, waiting for action, with the following as the current status: 1) My whole team, as well as the individual team founder, is waiting for the answer as to how to facilitate team foundership transfer to me from OBC in SETI (without waiting till June-something-teenth for a non-existent founder to not respond), 2) we're waiting for SETI to act because the other projects are waiting to see how SETI reacts to fix this, and 3) we're waiting on an acknowledgement that this is a cross-project, BOINCwide problem and whether there's a way to fix it, because as you can see, rather than acknowledging that yes, there's a back door left wide open for vandals/saboteurs/malcontents/hackers, it's being made out to be a local team issue when it goes beyond that.

Thanks for the support, and I appreciate everyone who's come out and acknowledged publicly as well as via PM.

All the best to all creatures great and small, and blessed be the broodmares,

StandardbredHorse