Hey everyone,
We're about to release an update to the developer preview with the following changes:
Some additional puzzle files may now be encrypted.
Hi, will this in any way be a mandatory update before the end of 1137 ? Will old clients be able to read the new client's output and vice versa ? It is very very inconvenient to have this update before the end of 1137 if that is the case.
If possible please hold off the update until after the end of 1137.
There isn't anything in this update that will break solution compatibility, so you should be fine either way.
We should be releasing this soon - we're waiting on final verification internally that the update is working as intended.
'Some additional puzzle files may now be encrypted'
please explain what this means - and why it is needed?
In order to increase the type of puzzles we can collaborate with outside partners on, we're merely adding a layer of encryption to ensure that unpublished raw data from collaborators isn't being leaked through the game.
Hope that helps!
Research institutions operate under intense pressure to publish new and meaningful results. Scientists are protective of their data (often the product of months or years of hard work); were it to fall into the wrong hands, another scientist might try to publish the data as his or her own work, thus robbing someone of their hard-earned "authorship."
While collaboration can be great for research, it opens the scientists to potential data leaks, and the mis-handling of shared information can get ugly (see this recent example).
With Foldit, we rely on collaborators for unpublished protein structures, predicted contacts, electron density, etc. And if we use a collaborator's data for a puzzle, anyone with a Foldit account can download that data with the puzzle. By encrypting the puzzle files, we're securing our collaborators' data, and hopefully encouraging more scientists to share their data with us!