Since then, others have followed suit, organizing similar efforts to search for cures for cancer, model climate change, and tackle complex mathematical concepts. SETI@home, though, remained the biggest, and for years the biggest such project, and for years, "NEZ" was one of it's biggest stars, a mysterious figure who had amassed 575 million hours of credits over the course of nine years, an achievement that led awed SETI users to describe "NEZ" as a god.
Turns out, he was only Brad Niesluchowski, IT director for the Higley, Arizona Unified School District. The key to his superhuman score? He'd installed SETI@home on some 5,000 of the district's machines.
District officials weren't amused. They claimed that SETI@home had led to more than a million dollars in damages from unnecessary wear and tear. Controversially, administrators also suggested that while searching for a cure for cancer was one thing, searching for aliens was something else entirely.
The reaction from the tech blogosphere was swift -- and harsh. Engadget raged:
"that's just peachy -- except that her flippant dismissal of SETI belies a complete ignorance of one of the oldest and most respected distributed-computing projects in the world, and what it's actually looking for."
Maybe so. But that doesn't explain the 18 school district machines running SETI@home in his basement.