PrimeGrid removes itself from Gridcoin

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Alez
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#1 PrimeGrid removes itself from Gridcoin

Post by Alez »

http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=8272

Here's the post
There's been a big discussion behind the scenes about turning BOINC credit into actual money. From a PrimeGrid admin standpoint, this is not a good thing. Even with worthless BOINC credit we've seen cheating in the past. When people are able to make money on PrimeGrid, that invites unscrupulous users to join in order to cheat. That in turn would ruin the science. Anyone devising a way to fake residues on prime-finding projects could be adding years to our search if they cause a missed prime. We don't want to discover five years from now that we can't trust our results.

The science (sieving, finding primes) is why we're here. Nothing can be allowed to interfere with that, otherwise we might as well shut down PrimeGrid right now. For this reason, we've decided not to participate in any system that monetizes our credit. While this policy will apply to any and all such organizations, we know of only one at the moment, and that's Gridcoin.

We'll be asking Gridcoin to de-whitelist PrimeGrid and we won't be sharing our daily statistics with them. Gridcoin users are welcome to crunch here, but won't earn any coin for doing so. If that means those users will be moving to other sites, we'll be sorry to see them go, but feel this is a step we must take.

This decision was not taken lightly and we're not happy about the necessity. Although Gridcoin is currently the only currency affected by this policy, this is not a reaction to anything that Gridcoin has done, or has not done. This policy is about the monetization of BOINC credit, not Gridcoin or cryptocurrencies in general.

While we welcome your comments on this, please understand that this is something we feel must be done and the decision is not going to be reversed.
To be fair, after the cheating on Collatz, I'm surprised it has taken this long for a project to take a stand. I wonder if Collatz will now follow and other projects that don't want to have to go through what Jon went through putting his project back together.
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#2 Re: PrimeGrid removes itself from Gridcoin

Post by Bryan »

As long as WCG doesn't stop ByteBall I don't care about the rest :lol:
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Alez
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#3 Re: PrimeGrid removes itself from Gridcoin

Post by Alez »

159 posts on the thread now. Things are getting heated, accusations of cheating etc. Sounds very familiar when people post crap without even understanding how BOINC works :lol:

Also seems that the Gridcoin software is scrapping the server for stats
With JimB's help, we determined that thousands of users, all of whom belonged to the Gridcoin team, were downloading exceptionally large statistics files, all at the same time. These are files used by websites such as BOINCStats or Free-DC, but are not needed nor typically accessed by individual users.

It appeared as if some bizarre sort of DDOS attack was being launched via Gridcoin against PrimeGrid.
I wonder how many other project servers are being effected by this ? For some smaller projects this would be crippling, especially during sprints etc.

Full message here
...but it was clear from the get go that Michael Goetz had a severe hatred for Gridcoin...


Let's look at the timeline of events...

On September 18th, shortly after midnight local time (04:00 UTC), I noticed I was having trouble connecting to PrimeGrid with my web browser. I noticed that there was a lot of outgoing traffic on the server's Internet connection. After a few minutes the problem went away by itself. I also observed that this problem seemed to have been occuring every day for quite a while.

With JimB's help, we determined that thousands of users, all of whom belonged to the Gridcoin team, were downloading exceptionally large statistics files, all at the same time. These are files used by websites such as BOINCStats or Free-DC, but are not needed nor typically accessed by individual users.

It appeared as if some bizarre sort of DDOS attack was being launched via Gridcoin against PrimeGrid.

What action, in my unbounded hatred for Gridcoin did I do?

Did I immediately cut off Gridcoin's access in order to protect PrimeGrid's server? No, didn't do that.

Did I cut off everyone's access? No, I didn't do that either.

Did I ban Gridcoin? Nope.

Did I notify the FBI's Cybercrimes division and/or whatever entity in New York State investigates and prosecutes Cybercrimes? No, didn't do that either. (Because I did not consider this to be intentional.)

What I did do was reach out to the one person I knew that was involved (somewhat) in Gridcoin's development ecosphere and asked him to contact whomever the correct people might be, and ask them if they knew what was happening, and if so, to please correct the problem.

I got a very pleasant, cooperative, and professional response in reply stating that they considered this a major problem and would fix it quickly.

Fantastic!

(Queue the theme music from "Jeopardy!")

Fast forward to October 4th, 16 days later.

Nothing has changed.

The daily DDOS attack is still ongoing.

I conclude that Gridcoin is either unwilling or unable to fix the problem. Certainly, for whatever reason, it's a fact that it has not yet been fixed. Do I immediately cut off Gridcoin's access? No. Ban the Gridcoin team? No.

The following day, we give notice that in one week we will be restricting access to the statistics. The purpose is to stop the DDOS attacks, which Gridcoin itself has not stopped despite having had more than two weeks to work on the problem.

I personally reached out to the two Gridcoin related entities I was aware of to make sure they would have access to the statistics under the new restrictions. As long as the access was limited to Gridcoin servers, and not the Gridcoin client software that had caused the DDOS attacks, Gridcoin was welcome to keep operating at PrimeGrid

On October 12th, we locked down the statistics, finally stopping the DDOS attacks.

It's true I lost my temper on the forums, and I've apologized for that. But looking at the way I've dealt with Gridcoin from the time I first noticed the DDOS attack, I don't think it's fair to conclude that I hate Gridcoin. Or, at a minimum, if I did in fact hate Gridcoin, I certainly didn't act upon that hatred. I think I've been more than fair in the way I've treated Gridcoin.
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