A long time ago, a vice president once told me that when a serious situation arises just say to yourself, "That's good." Then, presumably, figure out why it is good. That part can take days, weeks, or even months.
So we know that the spammer attacks are good, so how could they possibly be good? Just about every BOINC project is short of money, so why not try to monetize this stuff, like Google has monetized Internet search. Ten or fifteen years ago if someone had suggested that one could make money off a search engine, they would have laughed in your face, but I doubt if anyone is laughing at Google now. To monetize BOINC projects, it might take a consortium, substantially deeper knowledge of BOINC's users (so there is something to sell), and some record of page views (proof of use). It also might take one or more people selling the advertisements. I know this idea probably reads as crass commercialism and not very scientific or pure, but if the reason advertisements appearing on user account pages and message forums is explained softly, gently, and repeatedly to users, eventually you may hear more praise than criticism. BOINC projects may not be able to live off the public teat forever. Several years ago, the United States federal government did a study of the effectiveness of a federal gang control program. Seven identical gang control programs were installed in seven American cities. Three were hugely successful -- these cites had almost no gang activity, and the former gang members were working, in school, or in prison. Four gang control programs were complete duds and a waste of money. What was the difference between the successful and the failed programs? Leadership. The successful programs had leaders who were intensely interested in gang control and had the necessary management and leadership skills to implement and ramrod the program given them. The same phenomenon explains the failure of President Johnson's Great Society program. Many of the top city managers of Great Society programs were fairly dedicated to their task, but many of the middle managers and street bosses wanted to protest instead. So in the cities where the top Great Society managers could not or would not control their subordinates, nothing positive was done and the programs failed. One more example of this phenomenon: Every culture has noticed that child outcomes are almost completely a function of maternal education. The head of the Children's Bureau of the federal Health and Human Services Department performed a study to try to find out why. He found that the more education a family's female head had, the more correct child rearing behaviors she engaged in, and she performed them more frequently and more thoroughly. It was a consistent result of this study that men had very little impact on child outcomes, except for a small effect of the prestige of the main breadwinner's occupation. A very similar result has emerged from School Effectiveness Research (SER) at the personal, pupil level. Here, maternal education and the quality of the home learning environment are critical. The prestige of the main breadwinner's occupation has a small but consistent effect. Conclusion: If you want to try to monetize BOINC projects to make them self-funding, then choose someone who really wants it to lead it, has the skills to enact it (or can be trained in them, which takes much time), and can be effective in influencing others to carry out the program. Charles Elliott -----Original Message----- From: boinc_projects [mailto:boinc_projects-boun...@ssl.berkeley.edu] On Behalf Of David Anderson Sent: Monday, November 14, 2016 4:16 AM To: boinc_proje...@ssl.berkeley.edu Subject: Re: [boinc_projects] Spammer account attack happening. I'm enhancing delete_spammers.php to work for various classes of spammers. Should have this done shortly. Notes: - There's only one spammer in this case. They have a script that creates lots of accounts at lots of projects. - Some projects have mechanism to limit profile creation (min credit or reCAPTCHA). The spammer may be creating accounts, attempting to create profiles, and failing; the accounts remain. -- David On 11/14/2016 12:52 AM, Christian Beer wrote: > On 13.11.2016 01:32, Jord van der Elst wrote: >> Please check your account creation lists immediately. It looks like >> spammers are attacking in droves. > Hi Jord, > > can you specify what you mean by "attacking"? So far I've seen only > user accounts, no profiles and no forum posts. Are there examples of > those? A useraccount by itself can not contain any links or spammy > content. Only a profile or a forum post is publicly visible to be used for spam. > > Attaching a (most definitely) fake Android host to a project is a nice > touch so it is not so easy to delete the accounts. But then again how > useful is the account if you don't post spam after creating it. > > Regards > Christian > > _______________________________________________ > boinc_projects mailing list > boinc_proje...@ssl.berkeley.edu > http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_projects > To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter > your email address. _______________________________________________ boinc_projects mailing list boinc_proje...@ssl.berkeley.edu http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_projects To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter your email address. _______________________________________________ boinc_dev mailing list boinc_dev@ssl.berkeley.edu http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_dev To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter your email address.
