Duplicate block investigation

[Virus]

Duplicate blocks have always been a concern to the whole distributed.net community. They allow for individuals to inflate their own stats and corrupt the competitive nature of team statistics. D.net have been the only ones that can truly prevent duplicate blocks.

There was to be an undocumented setting in the pproxy that was suppost to stop duplicate blocks, coming though the pproxy, to some extent. I have known for some time that it was not working or stopped working with version upgrades, but I didn't want to bring attention to the problem.

Recently there has been a high level of duplicate blocks coming though the pproxy. Almost all of them have been coming from a few individuals. One of these individuals has been contacted and is aware that he was making a mistake. By not deleting the out buffer file, after manually submitting it. Others will be contacted if the flow of duplicates doesn't stop.

I will be taking steps to prevent duplicate blocks from being counted and to track the number of duplicates from each user. Any member from now on, that continues to submit large numbers of duplicate blocks. Will be contacted and could end up being banned from using the team proxy.

Not only future duplicate blocks will be discarded, but all duplicate blocks that have been submited though the pproxy since day 1. So you will soon be seeing a lot of members' numbers on the stats drop.

[buddmann]

Virus,Thanks for the update.I know that I personally have submitted duplicate blocks,but it was unintentional,as I have some machines that are not on-line and mixed up some floppys.Not knowing if I had submitted them or not I decided to resubmit them to be sure.
I did not realize that it was such a problem for Dnet,so I will not do this anymore,anyways,all of my PC's are on-line as of late so I haven't sent any blocks by floppy lately.
Although I still see a discrepancy between the pproxy and Dnet's stats,so I am assuming that they are random blocks.

BTW,how does Dnet differentiate between submitted blocks,resubmitted blocks and randoms?Or can they tell the difference?

Thanks for all the work that you have put into the pproxy also http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif
buddmann

[Mntsnow]

Thanks again Virus for all you do! http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[socalgal]

Yes, indeed. Thanks for the update, Virus, and for keeping things ... "squared".

[Wiruz]

I think l lot of us people with LAN-less cows hold a lot of the responsebility - when you're sitting with buff-out's from several different machines, it might get confusing.

If any of the blocks came from me, i would like to know rather quickly, so that i can fix the problem.

~Wiruz

Forgot: Thanks for all the work virus... couldn't have done it myself--- litterally...

[This message has been edited by Wiruz (edited 10-17-2000).]

[WildCajun]

On occasion I have submitted duplicate blocks in mass quantities by forgetting to delete the out buffer when submitting. To my knowledge I have not done this since being a member of SysOpt. That being said, it's bound to happen to me again. My apologies now, but it's inevitable for me http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/frown.gif

[Ultima]

I just went to the stats page.

All is working except for the by email page.

Any idea when that is gonna be up again Virus??

Pim

[voogru]

Ok Heres what Happend (to Me anyway)

I was using about 5 comps and they were munching for about 2-3 weeks (they each had about 1000-2000 Packets And then I copied the file from the hdd to a floppy and I didnt delete the file that was on the host Comp. so It just Kept building up blocks and I kept Getting thed same file from 5 different comps for 2 days I thought the comps were really munching a lot and when someone told me the prog dont delete the file automaticly i went to go delete the Buff-out. I didnt think of that and I made a Huge Mistake.

I dont really think that virus Should bann me but thats his Desion Not mine but If he does I have a comp that I spent 2 hours Trying to make it work and I dont want to reconfig it or build a pc out of it.

And If Im banned I just may quit cracking forever (im not gonna be cracking for anandtech).



[This message has been edited by voogru (edited 10-17-2000).]

[Virus]

Dnet can prevent counting duplicate blocks since they have a large database table that tracks every blocks have been issued and what blocks have been returned.

I will be doing a simular table, but it can only make sure the same block doesn't get counted more then once. To have a table like that, just keeping track of the blocks that have gone though this pproxy alone. Would be around 10 million records.

To give you an idea or how big of a problem this really is. I did a check to see how many duplicates have been submitted since the first of this month. The total was 47222 blocks. That is almost half a day worth in a little over half a month.

[Brydon]

Wow that is a lot of duplicate blocks http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/frown.gif. Well thanks for all the effort virus and it is really appreciated http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif.

[cwizard]

I may have accidently submitted a set of duplicate blocks day before yesterday. I wasn't sure if I had sent that file, so assuming that the pproxy did what it was suppose to, I figured to be safe. This is the only time this has happened.

It would seem appropriate to see if D.Net can provide a solution to the pproxy software. In any event, I don't care if the figures go down, but don't assume that everyone is doing this intentionally. For me, I just assumed that the Pproxy software was doing what is was suppose to do.

BTW, I'm having to write this with IE as suddenly, Netscape is giving java script errors and not loading the page. Get errors with IE but it is opening the page.

Cwizard

[This message has been edited by cwizard (edited 10-17-2000).]

[engracio]

Well since everybody is confessing to the duplication problem, let me add my confession too. I don't know when or if I ever did it. oh well count me in as guilty as charged, mainly because I noticed last week that my blocks in dnet was ~ 15,000 blocks less than pproxy. Granted I have been using the pproxy from the get go about a year ago. It could be random blocks that my machines have submitted which dnet disallowed and pproxy could not disallow. But on any case...

"BUT OFFICER I DID NOT DO IT, I IS FRAMED I TELL YOU, I IS FRAMED.....

BTW, should I dump to dnet directly for a while till my counts balance out with the pproxy or what??? Let the game begin....

e

[bkehoe]

Don't forget who asked ya to make a script. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif

Anyway, I sent in a few dupes once or twice before when usig floppys. "Are my sins forgiven?"

Engracio, its a well known fact that you always get up to 10% less on dnet as the blocks you submit may have already been cracked as randoms by someone else who got it submitted first. If you store and dump the more likely it is that someone cracks blocks before you as randoms.

I'd say almost everyone who transfers blocks with floppys has on occasion sent in blocks twice, but as Virus said, there are 'regulars' at submitting dupes, who may be doing it delibertly.

So, lets start the 'NO DUPE' campaign at Sysopt. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif


Happy dupeless cracking!
Brendan

[WildCajun]

Virus, 47K might seem like a lot, but it would only be me forgeting to empty the out buffer once on a Monday, so unless it's a routine event I wouldn't make that much out of it.

[Joel Kleppinger]

I think everyone here has, at one time or another, knowingly or not, submitted duplicate blocks. I think we should just support Virus's effort to be remove them from being counted and leave it at that.
http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[engracio]

Well, Boss man that sounds like a plan. Let's all make it happen..........

e

[brandon184]

Not me.

I play fair, or I don't play at all.

[voogru]

No More Duplicate blocks For Me!

[RCN_Moose]

Well, I don't have any offline comps cracking RC6 so I don't think I've submitted any duplicate blocks.

Virus- Way to go and keep up the great work.

Do you realize that if you were paid minimum wage for all the time you put in on this that you could be rich by now? http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif

Moose

[izzzy12k]

Here's a heads up virus...

I've been on vacation for over a week, and tried to fill up the buffers on 2 PC, but I'm sure they ate them by now and are chewing on randoms...

I guess we will see what happens.

Thanks for the update though! http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

izzy