yadap i went looking to find out if its open source . Only thing I could find was on reddit it was 4 years a go . So no telling if they are sharing now with the war and all ,
7) "Will the results be released as open science?"
Indeed we hope to also contribute to OpenScience.
8) "Thank you and sorry for my English."
We hope we answered your questions and thanks to You and to all of the participants for support. We hope we work more in the future.
Marko Jukic
Natalia Nikitina

TSBT caught cheating in the last Formula BOINC Sprint on SiDock (December 5-8).

There were inconsistencies noticed by several volunteers during this sprint with "Anonymous" hosts generating insanely high credits. and MANY of these hosts in existence. these could be seen by the 3rd party stats sites like Free-DC. these hosts were being awarded ~7000 credits per task, while most normal hosts were being awarded ~400 per task. The way this was happening was the hosts were faking their Flops rating for the CPU (this is easily done by editing the flops rating and then disabling CPU benchmarks in the BOINC client so that it stays inflated and not overwritten by a benchmark run). Normally for projects that use a Flops based credit system, they have a wingman to double check the credit reward to, which makes this kind of cheating less effective (two cheaters would have to match up to receive the inflated credit) but for SiDock since they are not using quorum of 2 validation, all results are marked valid and a single person can inflate their credits easily like this.

The SiDock Admins were notified and they did their investigation. Their response is a bit cryptic, likely due to a language barrier. Response here: https://www.sidock.si/sid..forum_thread.php?id=292

"SiDock is not F1" obviously a reference to FB since they set their Sprint schedule around the F1 race schedule
"we will be fining fairly" a reference to the credits removed for cheaters discovered

and looking at the 3rd party sites again, you can see exactly who lost all the points from that "fining".



over 20 million points removed from TSBT primarily (edit, not over 33M lost), and a few others on other teams as well (that were not even participating in the FB Sprint). That 20M 33M point reduction should knock off TSBT's 1st place finish in the sprint at the very least and IMO they should be banned outright for such blatant cheating. This isnt the first time TSBT has been caught cheating. almost every single participating member of the TSBT was found with faked hosts and credit removed.

Tim (UBT-Timbo) continues to turn a blind eye, and threaten anyone who accuses TSBT of cheating with a ban, but wont ban TSBT for actually cheating. and his response to being made aware of all these facts is "that's up to the SiDock admins and nothing to do with FB" which is just an outrageous response when the cheating happened to directly benefit during the sprint on FB. 

I would urge anyone here that has an account on FB to voice your concerns and opposition to this behavior on the formula BOINC forums (I am unable to because Tim is so paranoid of anyone signing up to speak truths like this that he will not validate any new users on the forums). I would also consider boycotting FB for 2025 and beyond. there are better competitons out there that don't support and harbor cheaters.

The "competition" aspect of FB is already kind of a joke.  I mean they shuffled teams and users around the different groups halfway through the season.  I just like FB as an excuse to run different projects/mini-events and usually just compare myself to our teammates.

It's really sad that people have to cheat to make themselves feel good. The people caught should be banned.
I wonder how many other projects use this system to award points, how many other sprints they cheated in' And the marathon points throughout the year are skewed. They need to fess up and own it. Then step down.
"The way this was happening was the hosts were faking their Flops rating for the CPU (this is easily done by editing the flops rating and then disabling CPU benchmarks in the BOINC client so that it stays inflated and not overwritten by a benchmark run)."
 
 

All projects that use creditnew (creditscrew) can be cheated. However, most projects have protections against this.
 
When a project utilizes a wingman (quorum of 2 or more) then both tasks of the same WU are awarded the same amount of credit. This can be either the "cheated" inflated credit or the "real" credit by the other host.
 
Some projects will give 0 credits when the two values are too far apart. As you can see here, this has happened before: https://www.rechenkraft.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=18184
Take note of the name of the person who started that thread. ;)
 
Projects can also put a maximum limit on how many credits a task can be worth, but I'm not sure of any projects that currently do that. It was pointed out to me by one of the PG Admins here:
 
edit
Image was messed up. Couldn't post it, so here is the quote:
"
This, actually, is very easy. PrimeGrid did this WAY way back when we used BOINC's old credit system. Very simply, just apply a maximum credit limit on top of the normal BOINC credit. Literally credit = min(credit, MAX_CREDIT);.

 

[8:40 AM]Eventually we decided (we being Jim and I) that all of our tasks were predictable enough that we could pre-calculate the credit for each task. It's not always easy to do, but it eliminates the need for host benchmarking, which worked horribly even when people weren't trying to cheat. (edited)

 

[8:43 AM]Making this change was only possible because our tasks have very predictable runtimes. For example, our old GeneferCUDA app would run for a few minutes and then predict the complete running time, usually to within a few seconds of the actual time. That makes it very easy to assign fair and consistent credit. But very few projects have tasks that behave like that."

Looks like nine of ten members of that team had points deducted. Lots of points at that. If it's true they cheated their team should be zeroed out for the year and they can start fresh. Except the year is pretty much over zero them out for the whole year.
 
Don't look good https://stats.free-dc.org...sid/43#google_vignette

bill1024
Looks like nine of ten members of that team had points deducted. Lots of points at that. If it's true they cheated their team should be zeroed out for the year and they can start fresh. Except the year is pretty much over zero them out for the whole year.
 
Don't look good https://stats.free-dc.org...sid/43#google_vignette

Just take a look at the admin's response on SiDock. he calls out TSBT as a team.
 
The "43, ..." part at the bottom of his posts is TSBT's team ID on SiDock. 
https://www.sidock.si/sidock/team_display.php?teamid=43
 
Notice the "43" in the above URL? Go to it. 

Pretty sad! 


also pututu at [H] 
https://stats.free-dc.org/team/sid/7

gsrcrxsi
Tim (UBT-Timbo) continues to turn a blind eye, and threaten anyone who accuses TSBT of cheating with a ban, but wont ban TSBT for actually cheating. and his response to being made aware of all these facts is "that's up to the SiDock admins and nothing to do with FB" which is just an outrageous response when the cheating happened to directly benefit during the sprint on FB. 

I would urge anyone here that has an account on FB to voice your concerns and opposition to this behavior on the formula BOINC forums (I am unable to because Tim is so paranoid of anyone signing up to speak truths like this that he will not validate any new users on the forums). I would also consider boycotting FB for 2025 and beyond. there are better competitons out there that don't support and harbor cheaters.

EXCUSE ME !!

I do not turn a blind eye and I do not ban people without reason. So get your facts right for a start. (user Orange Kid was deactivated on the FB forum after trolling. This was his second posting which came after he posted an image BEFORE any information came to light about cheating issues with the SiDock project. And he did not like his image being deleted so, instead of being courteous and acknowledging that it was unacceptable, he raised the stakes by trolling, which is against the FB Forum rules).

Remedial action on the FB website will be taken once Sebastien (FB founder) and I agree on what should take place - until then be assured that I take your opionionated rant very seriously...


"that's up to the SiDock admins and nothing to do with FB" 
Do not mis-quote me on this - read my FB post again and see the context in which i wrote this.

https :// / forum / viewtopic . php?p=3930#p3930


As for paranoia ?? No one is barred from signing up on the FB forum - though every sign-up is checked to limit spiderbots and trolls - so where did you get that idea from....maybe you are paranoid ? Possibly delusional ?
Have a nice day !
Tim
(edited twice, for typo and weblink)
 
 
Edit: Restored from "filter" by Cool GTX
 
second Edit by Cool GTX   I believe this is the link the member wanted posted?
https://www.formula-boinc.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3930#p3930
 
 
 
 
 

bill1024
It's really sad that people have to cheat to make themselves feel good. The people caught should be banned.
I wonder how many other projects use this system to award points, how many other sprints they cheated in' And the marathon points throughout the year are skewed. They need to fess up and own it. Then step down.
"The way this was happening was the hosts were faking their Flops rating for the CPU (this is easily done by editing the flops rating and then disabling CPU benchmarks in the BOINC client so that it stays inflated and not overwritten by a benchmark run)."

 
Hi

I agree with everything you say. :-)

The problems are that;
a) There is probably more than one team (perhaps limited to some members of some teams) who may have also cheated in the past, and until the BOINC projects can resolve this (in their validation routines before awarding any credit), then such cheating can go undetected and so it might be happening a lot or perhaps only in certain cases (such as on FB Sprints, on BOINC Games Sprints or similar events such as Project Challenges). 
b) Once caught, which is what has happened to TSBT, then I would expect them, via their team founder, to request to be excluded from any further FB events. That would be the professional way for their team to deal with this, as you clearly stated.

But if they choose not to admit to their cheating, then I as FB admin and Sebastien as FB founder will decide on the appropriate action.
regards
Tim