Most of us have taken a look at software like SETI@home and other similar distributed system programs (Genom project etc.) You contribute some of your computer time to analyze some bytes of code to find patterns (or not) which you send to a central database... Some users who spend a lot of their CPU time get rewarded and get a diploma(?) or a tshirt (wow).
Anyway, in order to get a tshirt and maybe some wired kind of satisfaction, SETI@home user(s) hack into other peoples computer inorder to alter their SETI@home score by doing the following. Processes called cpuidle (the real program most of us know) or other actually harmless names are used to run SETI@home on other users computer. They run in background at a very low priority, so a simple user won't recognize any loss of performance. But those hackers are stupid enough and leave their SETI@home accound ID on the computer that has been hacked. Otherwise SETI@home wouldn't credit the package to the hackers account. That's the new way of distributed system, eh...?
Anyway, in order to get a tshirt and maybe some wired kind of satisfaction, SETI@home user(s) hack into other peoples computer inorder to alter their SETI@home score by doing the following. Processes called cpuidle (the real program most of us know) or other actually harmless names are used to run SETI@home on other users computer. They run in background at a very low priority, so a simple user won't recognize any loss of performance. But those hackers are stupid enough and leave their SETI@home accound ID on the computer that has been hacked. Otherwise SETI@home wouldn't credit the package to the hackers account. That's the new way of distributed system, eh...?
