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Reeltime
Boinc Second Lieutenant
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#1 POEM

Post by Reeltime »

Found this at POEM message boards, don't know if it affects any other sites?

Greetings

There appears to be a loophole in the Boinc system whereas teams can be "hijacked" if the team founder has been inactive for a period of time.

Recently the Teddies team over at Rosetta@home had their whole team taken over, renamed and team members kicked off the team.

So please be warned.

If your team founder is not currently active at Poem please hand over the team foundership to one of your team mates that IS active here.

I would hate for this disgraceful activity to spoil one of our fine teams here.
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Nightlord

#2

Post by Nightlord »

Unfortunately it's a function of the server side template for a project website.

I was shocked last year when I migrated back to TSBT and subsequently received a founder change-request email from a small project. I had setup the team at that project and understandably my previous team felt it should be held by an active member of their team. The email from the project stated quite clearly that failure to respond within 60 days (IIRC) would result in the founder change-request being accepted by the project website automatically! :shock:

Of course it wasn't a problem for my previous team or myself and team founder status was changed accordingly. However, the fact that the project template code accepted the default without any other check left me wondering if it had been exploited already.

This is I guess the loop hole that was used at Rosetta. :cry:
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Buster Gunn
Boinc Second Lieutenant
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Posts: 513
Joined: Sun Aug 13, 2006 7:20 am
Location: Wilmington Delaware USA

#3

Post by Buster Gunn »

It's absolutely amazing to me that there are people out there that spend time looking for ways to hijack teams, beat the scoring system or just create havoc for the sole purpose of gaining cobblestones, that if I remember correctly, have absolutely no value. Ya can't spend them, trade them, swap them for a better life or use them on your food. It's our scoring system that allows us to guage ourselves against others. If ya gotta cheat to guage yourself a little higher then yipee. I'll keep looking for all those posts that laud the idiot for doing a great job.

I'm pretty sure that all our teams are actively founded.
Buster is my dog. Sadly, Buster is gone.
Buster is the Malamute, Obi is the Golden.

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Obi is the dog of the house now.
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rowpie
Peon
Posts: 239
Joined: Mon May 29, 2006 11:26 pm

#4

Post by rowpie »

all our teams are now ran by active members (or at least easy to contact ones) however it wasn't always so. during the big team name change we did have to go through the process of getting the founders changed on several projects in order to make sure the team migrated to the new name successfully.

Yes it was made easier by the fact that mega has a decent score and was founder of many of our projects so he had a bit more respectability however we still had to comply with each projects rules and wait several months for some of those names to be changed.

yes it can be exploited however i feel it would be more damaging to projects and teams should that function not be available.
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Megacruncher
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#5

Post by Megacruncher »

The founder change option is a useful one. When I did it the only way was to bother the project admins and get them to manually edit the databases. Which worked quite well for Seti & Einstein but an automatic system is better. Call me grandiose, millions do, but I like to think that it was my communication with David Anderson that had the now standard Founder Transfer feature added to Boinc project team pages.

I've only ever got the one request myself and that was from a new SETI member who wondered what-does-that-link-do & clicked it & found out!

I'm sure that if any major team were to be hijacked the project admins would undo the damage but all the same the Founders must be vigilant.
Willie the Megacruncher
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