1. GIMPS has received a good deal of bad publicity the past few days.
2. Aaron may have done something to warrant this bad publicity.
3. Aaron might not have done something to warrant this bad publicity.
I'll assume 1 and 3, that GIMPS has been unrightly criticized. Would it be
possible to explain to the news organizations how much this has hurt GIMPS and
try to convince them to post a positive article about the GIMPS project,
written by George (just to make sure the facts are straight)? Assuming that
GIMPS (defined: those running George's mersenne searching program) has done
nothing wrong, maybe we can get something positive out of this mess.
Thanks,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
PS Why can't I access www.mersenne.org or primenet?
In a message dated 9/16/98 2:08:03 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
writes:
> howdy folks...
>
> Big news.
>
> As Ernst Mayer posted to the list earlier (and emailed me a copy since I
> haven't been reading the list), I was doing something peculiar with NT
Prime
> (not Prime95) at US WEST.
>
> As you might expect, there's more to the story than meets the eye.
>
> Yes, I was running the software and a good number of machines, as you
> regular list subscribers may recall from earlier in the spring of this
year.
> They found the program running and were un-appreciative, so they removed it
> (and removed me as well...it's cool, I was working as an outside
> consultant).
>
> I'm thinking it's all blown over by now, then the FBI raids my place,
> confiscates all my computer equipment, and, as it turns out, suspect that,
> besides the prime number search, they believe I'm *still* getting into
their
> network, planting trojans, installing surveillance software, etc. Yikes!
>
> Just so you all know, besides running NT Prime on some machines, I haven't
> done anything else to computer on their network.
>
> It's a bit funny...the local paper here, the Denver Post, ran the article
> first, and the guy just didn't understand what a prime number was. Sadly,
> he read the search warrant which mentions www.mersenne.org, and he read
from
> there and tried to include some info on primes in his article. Curiously,
> he mentions that Mersenne thought there were only 11 prime numbers, and how
> there are currently 37 known prime numbers...he failed to distinguish
> between *prime* and *Mersenne prime*.
>
> Oh well...
>
> The Post article was on their web site yesterday and may still be found
> there (I don't know)... www.denverpost.com
>
> Ziff-Davis News contacted me and since I've been told not to talk to the
> media (there *may* be charges filed regarding the unauthorized use of
> network resources), I could only talk to the ZD News guy off the record.
He
> said he just might write an article on the GIMPS project though, so
> hopefully that will spurn some positive interest. Keep an eye on
> www.zdnews.com just in case he does write something.
>
> Meanwhile, it is US WEST's allegation that NT Prime was so affecting their
> computers that it was causing large delays in some of their other programs.
>
> As you and I well know, NT Prime (I hadn't changed it's default priority
> setting) runs at the lowest priority. I contend that the problems they
> experienced on that particular day were due to the slow mainframe access
> that the other programs were running into. It's happened before I put NT
> Prime on, and it's no surprise that it was still a problem for them. Also
> the problem only affected their machines in Phoenix, but NT Prime was also
> running on machines in Omaha, Denver and Seattle, which had *no* problems
at
> all.
>
> It *may* be necessary to get testimony from other NT Prime (or Prime95)
> users in case US WEST tries to go ahead and press charges so that I can
> demonstrate that NT Prime does not cause the kinds of problems they allege.
> The burden of proof is with them to show that NT Prime is the problem, and
> they will (from other things) have a hard time proving that.
>
> I hope my actions didn't make us prime number hunters look like doofuses or
> anything...at this point I'm hoping that the publicity will bring more
GIMPS
> members...
>
> I resubscribed to the list, so I'll be reading responses to this topic, but
> I may not be able to fully comment on anything in particular.
>
> Thanks and sorry,
> Aaron Blosser
>
>
