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I don't specifically miss SETI@home as much as I miss the spirit of the internet back then, the "what will they think of next!?" The idea that all of us could t
by fsckboy 4y ago
I don't specifically miss SETI@home as much as I miss the spirit of the internet back then, the "what will they think of next!?" The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Now computers are so complex and task heavy and fraught with problems it seems like more hassle than it's worth. I liked when wondering "why is my machine so slow", that "top" or "ps auxww" had a chance of fitting on a screen or two. Now I wouldn't look forward to unleashing an eternal, 24-7, intensive task with a connection to the internet, even though I have a lot more bandwidth.
- bitcoinistrash 4y ago> The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Hasn’t changed that much. Here we are in 2023 where most of this distributed power goes to cracking sha 256 hashes. Just for speculation and profit instead of leaderboards.
- chungy 4y agoBitcoin has nothing to do with "cracking SHA256 hashes", for what it's worth. The only thing remotely related is how it brute-forces inputs until it generates hashes that begin with a certain number of bits set to 0.
- hot_gril 4y agoIt's continually testing the strength of SHA256. If you can find a way to even partially crack it, you win money. Edit: Also, way more hashes are happening all the time now, increasing the chance that someone finds a collision if it were possible.
- chungy 4y agoThat's still not what the Bitcoin miners are doing. They're manipulating inputs, trillions of times a second, just to match a "magic" target for a SHA256 hash starting with a certain number of bits set to 0. Cracking hashes would imply that they're taking pre-existing hashes and reversing them to find the input.
- hot_gril 4y agoHashes have multiple requirements for security. You're talking about only one facet, which is that you cannot be given a hash and produce a matching input without consulting a rainbow table (I think there's a term for this, I forget it though).
- IncRnd 4y agoChungy is correct though. Bitcoin has absolutely nothing to do with "cracking sha256 hashes". Bitcoin hashes until the correct output is found. There are double hashes, but that is solely to avoid collisions and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest.
- thfuran 4y ago>and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest. So why'd you bring it up?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- squeaky-clean 4y agoUser bitcoinistrash is the one that brought it up, and they're spreading incorrect information about how it works. Cracking sha256 hashes implies trying to reverse a specific hash. There are literally thousands (millions?) of potential inputs that hash to a valid bitcoin mining block output. It's basically a race to find the first one matching the rules of the current block difficulty. The goal isn't to produce any one specific input/hash pair.
- glass3 4y agoIn which context would somebody try to reverse a hash? That would be like arbitrarily enhancing a bad-resolution image to see something that cannot be seen. Hash collision should always be about finding matching content for a hash.
- cypress66 4y ago> hashes that begin with a certain number of bits set to 0. This myth was always intriguing to me. Where does it come from? It's not a number of 0s (which would imply difficulty could only be doubled or halved), it's just finding a hash that is less than the target.
- hot_gril 4y agoYeah, cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt today to the spirit of the old internet.
- SECProto 4y ago> cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt today to the spirit of the old internet Cryptocurrency feels like the exact opposite of the old internet to me - it feels like a bunch of anonymous bros looking for the next sucker to scam out of money and get rich quick.
- wvoch235 4y agoThe nature of the scam has evolved, and possibly the parties involved have changed, but the scams were always there.
- Breza 4y agoI agree with you. The early web was full of amazing opportunities but had trouble monetizing things. Cryptocurrency is the opposite, it tries to monetize everything but doesn't have practical uses.
- fho 4y agoBitcoin was "old internet" tech at some point. Just for reference, I bought my first BTC at 0.20 €/BTC. Back then it looked like the future to a lot of us ... "hey! We/Hackers can make our own money. And it is superior to state issued money!" ... looking back, it honestly it is somewhat to see the state of cryptocurrencies today.
- landoftheice 4y ago[dead]
- RobotToaster 4y agoI thought it was a dumb idea at the time, that nobody would be stupid enough to invest in. I still think it's a dumb idea, but I've learnt not to underestimate human stupidity.
- Dalewyn 4y ago>I miss the spirit of the internet back then Classic SETI@home's website[1] is a blast to browse. [1]: https://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/ https://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/
- TheCaptain4815 4y agoThe recent neural network "revolution" is giving me those vibes, even though it'll ironically kill the old internet with the upcoming spam bots.
- hot_gril 4y agoI get the opposite vibe because the forerunner is ClosedAI.
- TheCaptain4815 4y agoTrue, but to be fair it was only recently that OpenAI really took over with ChatGPT and their api cost. Before that (just 3-4 months ago), the open source models were excellent competitors.
- hot_gril 4y agoYeah but it's a huge gap. The other chat bots were just for research or fun, while ChatGPT is truly useful for average people.
- rurp 4y agoIf it were based on open ended tooling that anyone interested could experiment freely with, I would feel the same. Unfortunately these giant LLMs are almost the complete opposite of that.
- xtracto 4y agoI was just thinking that it would be great to do something like seti@home but for an open libre super LLM: Install a client that would help run / train the huge llm and you get Access to the network to do queries. Kind of how napster/Kazaa were at their time. I would love to work on doing something like that.
- Freebytes 4y ago
- _yb2s 4y agoPower and cooling were at fixed levels and computers couldn’t really sleep, so cpu cycles were just wasted without seti@home. Nowadays computers idle efficiently, so something like that would make your computer louder and more expensive to run.
- porknubbins 4y agoI’m probably about median age for HN and when I was looking into folding Seti@home I had no idea and didn’t worry about power cost because it was subsidised by my parents or university. Plus energy was cheaper then. Now as an adult seeing a month of a few GPUs running on the utility bill really hurts.
- ETH_start 4y agoThe fact that energy hasn't gotten more affordable really demonstrates a deficiency of planning. We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.
- makeitdouble 4y agoAnother way to look at it: there is no miracle solution. It´s easy to look at any situation and say ¨If only they´d _just_ XXX¨. It´s never that simple. Even if you deeply believe your solution is flawless and people ¨just¨ need to be convinced, the very fact that the situation is happening at all is an indication it will be a long and dire fight... > essentially limitless oh well
- bboygravity 4y agoCounterpoint: France is doing extremely well in Europe and is the only country that is doing well (I'm talking energy-wize). France is a nuclear energy country. So yes, there is 1 pretty great solution to the energy problem and yes it has existed since the 50's..
- shmoe 4y agodistributed.net ftw.. those truly were the days.
- kelnos 4y agoThe last time I ran SETI@home (and Folding@home), I had a fixed desktop machine that I always left on, and I think it was old enough that the fan speeds weren't variable, so it was just constant background white noise. In that context, running those apps in the background all day and all night was fine, and if they ever noticeably interfered with performance while I was using the machine, pausing them for a bit was easy to do. I haven't had a desktop computer in at least 14 years. When I'm not using my laptop, I close it and it goes to sleep. Running CPU-intensive apps on my laptop spools the fans up to their loudest, and makes the bottom of its chassis uncomfortably warm. The CPU cores will sometimes hit thermal throttling too. I just don't want to deal with that sort of thing all day. Then again, I do have a couple Raspberry Pis, an old Mac Mini (running Linux), and a CM4-based NAS in various places in the house running 24/7. I could probably run an @gome-type app on one or more of those. But for whatever reason, doing so just never really occurred to me.
- ge96 4y agoI run fold@home I'm at 207M points... Sucks I'm in 14K range... I'll probably never hit #1 haha
- gambiting 4y agoI'm at 466M points and within top 10k donors.....that's just thanks to running folding@home on my own machines for the last 15 years lol. https://stats.foldingathome.org/donor/id/9171 https://stats.foldingathome.org/donor/id/9171
- ge96 4y agowow that's nuts... I don't know how many months I'd take me to catch up/by that point ahead again 15 years is insane though... I only recently started with an i9 and 3080Ti on medium/highest priority
- dustymcp 4y agoI just cant get a laptop i feel comfortable working on, they all have that slow feel, where a desktop is just crisp and i can always just switch out anything i dont like about the current build..
- iancmceachern 4y agoTotally. Now it feels like the internet is more about exploiting people for profit.
- ar9av 4y ago:'-( I installed SETI@HOME on both my office and home machine back in '98 / 99. I know my contributions were not very much in the sense just how much can one laptop & a desktop do but I watched (and hoped) SETI@HOME as it progressed (:-) and then there's always that wishful thinking that someone somewhere would hit jackpot)... Hoping you guys come back again. Best.
- dheera 4y ago> I wouldn't look forward to unleashing an eternal, 24-7, intensive task with a connection to the internet Just use another machine for stuff like this? Spare computers are cheap nowadays.
- atemerev 4y agoThe spirit is alive with AI.
- fsckboy 4y agoyes, after I posted that, I had the same thought. but we spend a lot of time here talking about the lack of openness in AI, and some justified fear of the companies that own it smothering many other sectors the way search and cloud computer got smothered and centralized. a chatGPT@home large scale group effort would be sort of cool to participate in... but then I think, so many opportunities for mal-actor exploitation
- ChancyChance 4y agoWhat was the RSA crack effort you mention? It doesn't seem feasible, considering finding a SHA-256 collision would take so much compute power we don't have words to describe it, and even coming up with thoughts to frame the problem is hard (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9JGmA5_unY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9JGmA5_unY). I can't imagine cracking even an RSA2048 key with everyone working on it.
- mwbajor 4y agoLookup project Argus by the SETI League: http://www.setileague.org/argus/ http://www.setileague.org/argus/
- PeterStuer 4y agoIt was my machine that found the key in the very first RSA competition.