User:Another n00b/cabal@home
Cabal@Home was a distributed computing program developed by several people at the Uncycloversity's Department of Research. The project was started sometime around 1987 in an attempt to find the elusive Cabal. The project lasted until 1992 when the "king of the internet" Bob Dole declared the search a waste of money. Many conspiracy theorists believe that Dole's actions were directly resultant of pressure put on him by the Cabal.
It was first sent to over 660 recipents on CNET and Usenet. The users un-knowingly sent it off, to the point where within three weeks most of the online users at the time had the program running on their computers. It is said to have gotten into the computers of people like Ray William Johnson and Bill Gates. The program only ran itself for about twenty-minutes, before blipping itself. Though it tried to hide itself, some people found it when it attempted to execute.
Summary[edit | edit source]
The idea was that users from around the world would download the program un-wittingly to their computers and all the unused computer cycles that were not used were used for the finding of the elusive Cabal. It took around twenty minutes to search everything on the O: drive and the main hard-drive. Four programmers at Uncyclopedia University wrote the program in responce to an e-mail asking for "proof of the cabal", since they where conspiracy theorists who had posted their tinfoil hat on to several servers.
When activated the program would download a "Work Unit" (WU) from a specific core. The computer would then process the needed information from the work unit. Notable cores include:
- WU/REF/WHIT - viewed all contacts which where connected to DNS 4000.
- WU/REF/UNCY - viewed all messages sent forward and backwards from a network.
- WU/REF/LANG - searched everything located at Langely Core.
- WU/REF/1/10 - scoured for any admin privileges on the network, would then ping a sender-address and a basic whois to the server at Uncycloversity. This was the only thing that was actually needed for this project.
During the dawn of the internet[edit | edit source]
When the internet was invented two years after the project started, the cabal@home program was "re-called" and was modified for various reasons. The most notable of these was the changes made to WU/REF/1/10, which was changed so that it would also save the whois to uncyc.edu.tc, which was the official cabal@home research site.
In 1990 some users found the program running on their computer, stopped it and backtraced it to the network at the uncycloversity server. They complained to the head of the institution, saying the students had been running an illegitimate network operation. The information for the cabal@home program was hidden when an inspection was run. When it was discovered again in 1992, a lawsuit was set-up against the programmers but it was dropped almost immediately.