| Index | Recent Threads | Unanswered Threads | Who's Active | Guidelines | Search |
 |
World Community Grid Forums
Category: Community
Forum: Chat Room
Thread: The PrimeGrid Cheating Scandal |
| No member browsing this thread |
|
Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 53
|
|
| Author |
|
|
RaymondFO
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 30, 2004 Post Count: 561 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
PrimeGrid made the following announcement on their WEB site on 20 Apr 2013 http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=4976 :
"At the end of February, we discovered that a small group of people were cheating by faking results. Changes were immediately made to our validation software to prevent this from happening again. We have rescinded all the credits from the users who were cheating. To be fair, we've also deducted those credits from the teams they were in. Of course, not everyone in their teams are cheaters, but fraudulently gained credits shouldn't count towards team scores. Some of the teams affected are amongst the oldest, largest teams here, and in some cases those teams have lost in excess of 1 billion credits. The other team members, no doubt, knew nothing of the cheating, so no stigma should be attached to these teams, or their members. I'm listing the teams here only so that if you suddenly see your team's credits and/or rank have dropped, you'll know why. The following teams (team ID: team name) have lost credits: 64: BOINC@Taiwan 1: BOINCstats 103: Dutch Power Cows 2887: TaiwanROC 852: SETI@Taiwan �x�W�ζ�" And user id tag "x3mEn" made the following disclosure on the same thread: "As far as I can see, it looks like troubles also waiting for WCG. 8 accounts except PrimeGrid also have WCG credits. And ONLY WCG. And their common property - they all were created in WCG almost at the same time - 19-20 Jan 2013: 195120 bluesky World Community Grid | 1,386,450 | 2,674 | 19 Jan 2013 195006 Vincent World Community Grid | 1,287,909 | 3,259 | 19 Jan 2013 194508 Patrick Wu World Community Grid | 1,271,905 | 3,055 | 19 Jan 2013 193201 kobe World Community Grid | 2,015,410 | 2,105 | 19 Jan 2013 192593 redbull World Community Grid | 2,595,243 | 43,629 | 20 Jan 2013 192513 Evans World Community Grid | 2,007,255 | 33,550 | 19 Jan 2013 190035 alex World Community Grid | 2,543,346 | 39,734 | 19 Jan 2013 189589 Turbo World Community Grid | 2,649,513 | 45,019 | 20 Jan 2013 And their "teacher": 56823 Brain World Community Grid | 91,418,650 | 806,898 | 24 Feb 2010" Truly disgraceful behavior. |
||
|
|
gb009761
Master Cruncher Scotland Joined: Apr 6, 2005 Post Count: 3010 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
Well, hopefully the WCG validators have prevented any kind of incident such as this from happening.
---------------------------------------- |
||
|
|
BladeD
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 28976 Status: Offline Project Badges:
|
Yep, saw the notice on BM.
---------------------------------------- |
||
|
|
twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2130 Status: Offline Project Badges:
|
How do you "fake" finding a prime number - although I'm guessing that's probably not how it works since you're talking about primes that have thousands if not many more digits.
----------------------------------------Still, odd that they would have set up accts here at the same time unless they had some inside knowledge of how the validators work.   |
||
|
|
RaymondFO
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 30, 2004 Post Count: 561 Status: Offline Project Badges:
|
How do you "fake" finding a prime number - although I'm guessing that's probably not how it works since you're talking about primes that have thousands if not many more digits. Still, odd that they would have set up accts here at the same time unless they had some inside knowledge of how the validators work. The sieving tasks that they faked was looking for factors to help find prime numbers. It is my understanding that discovered prime numbers may be subject to additional verification or checking. [Edit 1 times, last edit by RaymondFO at Apr 23, 2013 1:49:34 AM] |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
How do you "fake" finding a prime number - although I'm guessing that's probably not how it works since you're talking about primes that have thousands if not many more digits. Still, odd that they would have set up accts here at the same time unless they had some inside knowledge of how the validators work. The sieving tasks that they faked was looking for factors to help find prime numbers. It is my understanding that discovered prime numbers may be subject to additional verification or checking. And every task they cheated on will need to re-done. What a waste!  [Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Apr 23, 2013 2:10:25 AM] |
||
|
|
knreed
Former World Community Grid Tech Joined: Nov 8, 2004 Post Count: 4504 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
Those individuals did join WCG and we have checked their results and all of their results are either pending validation, inconclusive or invalid. They have no valid results. Our validators have kept the data safe.
----------------------------------------Given this issue and the discussion in this thread: https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,34960 we have tightened up how we handle the max_jobs_per_day and credit for invalid results. See my post here: https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewpostinthread?post=419186 for details. These will make it more difficult and less rewarding for these type of contributors in the future. [Edit 1 times, last edit by knreed at Apr 23, 2013 2:33:10 AM] |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Those individuals did join WCG and we have checked their results and all of their results are either pending validation, inconclusive or invalid. They have no valid results. Our validators have kept the data safe. Given this issue and the discussion in this thread: https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,34960 we have tightened up how we handle the max_jobs_per_day and credit for invalid results. See my post here: https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewpostinthread?post=419186 for details. These will make it more difficult and less rewarding for these type of contributors in the future. It's good to see that you guys are on top of this. Nice job!  |
||
|
|
BSD
Senior Cruncher Joined: Apr 27, 2011 Post Count: 224 Status: Offline |
Points and Credits - what a waste. The motivation is helping your fellow human, it's about the cures.
  |
||
|
|
gb009761
Master Cruncher Scotland Joined: Apr 6, 2005 Post Count: 3010 Status: Offline Project Badges:
|
Those individuals did join WCG and we have checked their results and all of their results are either pending validation, inconclusive or invalid. They have no valid results. Our validators have kept the data safe. Given this issue and the discussion in this thread: https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,34960 we have tightened up how we handle the max_jobs_per_day and credit for invalid results. See my post here: https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewpostinthread?post=419186 for details. These will make it more difficult and less rewarding for these type of contributors in the future. It's good to see that you guys are on top of this. Nice job! Yes, it's good to see that everything is checking out okay over here - we certainly (as does anyone else), want any of these shenanigans happening here. Well done for checking and confirming that all is well. |
||
|
|
|