SETI@home a security risk?
This rather wacky report talks about the possibility that ETs could infect the earth’s computers with viruses by transmitting certain signals which cause (say) buffer overflows in our computers and infect the internet.
Dr. Carrigan thinks that the SETI scientists should implement some kind of decontamination procedure to clean the signals before they are distributed.
It seems kind of obvious to me that if we knew enough to conclude that a particular signal was trying to act as a virus, we’d have pretty strong proof that extra-terrestrial intelligence was a reality.
I tried to locate the actual article, but could only find this link to the abstract.
Whacky.