I have to agree, i view most of these efforts with suspicion. I don't 
give any of my cycles to them. the mathemtical ones, the mersenne prime 
finders and stuff, theyre fine, esp because they dont even often demand 
that you use their clients or anything, just take some work and do it. 
especially the private companies though, i have very little faith that 
their goals are well-intentioned, ethical, or beneficial. i'll use my 
cycles for my own very compute-intensive research.. :)

happy hacking,

isildur

On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, it was written:

> I dont worry about seti@home but I wouldn't run it on critical systems.  It's 
> easy to understand why they wouldn't want it to be open source.  It is after 
> all scientific research.  That would be like drug testing but giving everyone 
> the ingredients to the drug instead of the drug itself.  Even without the 
> source people have reverse engineered it and modified it.  They didn't find 
> anything out of the ordinary with it.  You can always sniff the packets it 
> sends also.
> 
> What I really dont trust is the windows only client for cancer research.  
> They really dont give a lot of information about what exactly they are 
> looking for, the work is being done for proffit making companies, and there 
> is no real garranty the "cure" will be shared with everyone if found.  They 
> only promise to share the results.  The have to publish that anyway.
> 
> Plus the company that wrote the software is know to be writing software for 
> companies to be doing the same thing within their private networks.  This 
> could just be a large advertising move on their part.  Also the software is 
> of a client/plugin nature.  The client connects to the server to send and 
> receive data but the plugin does the work.  It supposidly can update itself 
> "without user intervention" so it could possible switch plugins on you 
> without your knowlege.
> 
> My 2 cents on seti@home
> 
> On Tuesday 19 June 2001 13:20, you wrote:
> > On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, Matthias Buelow wrote:
> > > der Mouse writes:
> > > >I can't take seti@home seriously until they're willing to let me
> > > >compile my own client binary; I refuse to turn my machines over to
> > > >(practically) unverifiable and unfixable code.
> > >
> > > <paranoid>
> > > Especially when what your machines are actually doing is analyzing
> > > Echelon data for the CIA? ;P
> > > Now, that would be a great joke, wouldn't it, the U.S. using computing
> > > resources all over the world, in particular in those countries from
> > > where they've collected the data by industry espionage in first place.
> > > </paranoid>
> > >
> > > No, I certainly wouldn't run the stuff, and even if I had source,
> > > I'd like to know exactly where the data came from.
> > >
> > > --mkb
> >
> > You want to know how funny this is, I was thinking *exactly* the same
> > thing!  Just wanted to finish the thread before I replied :-)
> > Sad to say - #1, I think it would be a brilliant move, and #2, I wouldn't
> > put it past them.
> >
> > -Linc.
> 
>