The Truth is Out There.
As a loyal Heinousite, it is your duty to contribute CPU cycles to the collective search for otherwordly intelligence. Keep Heinous BBS competitive in the cutthroat arena of ultrarich megacorporate crunching teams and bloodthirsty cheating hax0rs!

First however, you need to download the SETI@Home Client.
 

For those unfamiliar with the concept of distributed computing, it is relatively easy to imagine. In cases where a problem is so huge or complex that it would take an incredibly powerful supercomputer years to complete, the problem can be broken up into smaller bite-size chunks and fed to thousands of ordinary desktop computers and workstations. While the computing power of a modern desktop PC is impressive, especially when compared to systems of only a few years ago, the combined power of thousands of PCs (and beefy corporate workstations and servers) is truly impressive - indeed, it can be faster than any single computing system ever assembled. The processing might of such a setup can be used to solve problems that require massive amounts of repetitive actions such as combing through a data stream and analyzing it for certain characteristics in thousands of slightly different ways - which is exactly what the SETI@home project does with data recorded from the Arecibo Radio Telescope.

There are numerous problems when undertaking a search for radio signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. In addition to the vast distances between the stars, space contains many strong natural radio sources as well as clouds of gas, dust, charged particles and other things that can interfere with a radio signal. Even worse, everything in space is in motion in relation to everything else which affects all electromagnetic emissions such as light, radio waves, and X-rays with a phenomenon known as Doppler shift. In addition, some frequencies of radio waves travel better for vast distances through common conditions in space and through the veil of the Earth's atmosphere.

The SETI@home project searches a narrow band of the radio spectrum which has been determined to be especially receptive to propogation of signals through space. Although SETI@home searches a relatively small part of the spectrum, the vast amount of processing resources donated by users running SETI@home clients enables the search to be especially fine in detail. The job of the SETI@home client is to comb through the radio data recorded from the telescope (essentially the same thing as static on the screen of a television tuned to an empty channel) and look for candidate signals. A candidate signal is one that does not resemble natural noise sources, is especially strong at a narrow range of frequencies (narrowband), is consistent (pulsed, repeating, or continuous), and fits a predicted profile of what such a singal would look like when taking into account the characteristics and motion of the receiving equipment. As well as separating potential signals from an ocean of noise, the client must analyze the same block of data at many different Doppler shifts due to the relative motion of the Earth and any transmitting equipment.