|?? cheating at BU

[Mumps]

Over the past 5 days, Set\/e, myself, and others have been trying to communicate through rebirther with Henri to track down and address what we've determined is a single user that is putting up huge numbers on BU by returning the same results file for just about every WU he receives. It took a while to even convince rebirther that it *was* invalid results, and since that point, he's gone silent. In response, Ste\/e has decided to go dark, and I am encouraging everyone else to join in. If they won't respond to studied analysis of the situation, maybe they'll respond to losing most of their true crunching power.

Congrats to Team China !!! (http://www.bitcoinutopia.net/bitcoinutopia/forum_thread.php?id=975)

[Mike029]

Over the past 5 days, Set\/e, myself, and others have been trying to communicate through rebirther with Henri to track down and address what we've determined is a single user that is putting up huge numbers on BU by returning the same results file for just about every WU he receives. It took a while to even convince rebirther that it *was* invalid results, and since that point, he's gone silent. In response, Ste\/e has decided to go dark, and I am encouraging everyone else to join in. If they won't respond to studied analysis of the situation, maybe they'll respond to losing most of their true crunching power.

Congrats to Team China !!! (http://www.bitcoinutopia.net/bitcoinutopia/forum_thread.php?id=975)

I've noticed the massive increase but assumed they got one of the big Chinese farms to crunch for them for a bit. I posted in the threat but this needs to get out to all the teams who put resources into this project.

[zombie67]

I shut down my r-boxes a few days ago anyway. I hit my 5b badge at the last of the active sub-projects, which was my goal. I will be back once they have new sub-project badges.

[Mike029]

Update, looks like they are on to the cheater. They have started blacklisting his boxes. We'll see how this plays out.

[Mumps]

Well, looks like Henri has cleaned up the |?? account and credits. But the user just created a new account and taunted Henri that he was going to continue to be a jerk. Because Henri has responded, and done what he could initially, Ste\/e has decided that he doesn't want to stay boycotting the project because of one individual. So he's back to crunching while Henri works out how to address improving the validator to at least make them have to start over.

I'll be hopping back on as well. So anyone else that had joined the effort to get the project to respond can do as they see fit. Thanks!

[Mike029]

It would appear the scammers are not done yet with BU. Things are getting ugly. BU is now experiencing a DDoS attack on the project. Rebirther is pissed and asking Team China admins to step up.

[Shandia]

LOL! I didn't think anyone would go to the lengths to do this. What a waste of time unless they are just sharpening their claws for something else. Yeah, I see that user created a new account today and has managed to pull in some big credits. It does look like the only way to deal with this is to strip the team for everything they have worked for. Even then, it won't change much. They will likely pick another team in an attempt to continue screwing the system. That actually makes us a pretty big target. I wish I could pull in 1B a day with a brand new account. This is something that would be hard to fix due to the nature of mining. I hope BU can find a solution to this issue.....like blocking the IP or IP's of the intended area if it's possible. I'm sure there must be some way to cut off access to users, even with masking software, to stop this crap.

And from what I read on the Team China site, there are those who are looking to take down the entire Boinc system. Once again, what a waste that a few have the desire to fuck so many over just because they can. There are privileges for having full access with a dummy account to that team's site.

[zombie67]

Let's say I wanted to do something evil. I join sic* on a project, and do the deed. Would it be right to hold sic* responsible?

What could they do to stop me? Nothing. They could kick me from their team, over and over as I created new user IDs. Across a hundred projects. They could claim I was not one of them, and that they were not responsible. But why would anyone believe them? They are tarnished for life, right?

[Shandia]

I totally agree that there is little to nothing that can stop a user from creating a new account on a team. BU did the right thing for the moment locking things down for new user creation. james ying aka |?? aka fffff needs a little time to chill out and have the project return to normal. ;-)

[Fire$torm]

To paraphrase Forrest Gump; Evil is as Evil does. Sigh....

[yoyo]

I think blocking will not work, the cheater then uses a different userid/team/IP.
I told rebirther already a year back that there workunits are much to small. At this time they were running on my laptop only 7 minutes. They should increase the runtime drastically. This much better for the server.
For counterstrike the cheating I would store all results in a database and if a result is returned a second time, twice of the credit which would be granted will be reduced and the account will be blocked.
Don't know how simple it is to implement it.

[Mumps]

Problem with that approach, yoyo, is that, as the fraud went along, the later results were returned with everything a normal cgminer run would produce, simply fabricated by a program that did none of the work. It just created random "Accepted" hashes and calculated appropriate GH/s speeds to make the output look like a real result. Only 4 thousand times faster.

For BU, the biggest challenge is coming up with a way to verify the work is actually done. Aside from the easily faked text only output, there's nothing really obvious that they can use to confirm the work that was done by cgminer through a third party that can be trusted. Other projects will need to work through ways of ensuring the work is done, by the host assigned even. As the fraud over on WCG shows, they even copied the output of their wingman to "complete" WU's for credit, while doing nothing to help ensure the validity of those results.

In a "trust but verify" environment like BOINC, it's pretty likely that people with attitudes like this will come along and make everything the project is working for and towards something that's no more "science" than wikipedia is guaranteed to be "facts."