Get Permission FIRST!

[I.M.O.G.]

I am taking a Business Law class at Kent State University this semester, actually it starts in about 3 hours. But anyways my professor is also a practicing lawyer. He has been to trial over cases on this subject. IT CAN AND DOES HAPPEN:

Just the other day we talked about use of company computers for ANYTHING other than work use. This includes emails, instant messageing clients, download agents, games, and DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING CLIENTS along with any other personal application you run or install on the computer. The company has the RIGHT to do anything with and look at anything stored on their computers, there is NO INVASION OF PRIVACY RIGHTS. If the company finds ANY of the aforementioned on a computer, the person responsible CAN BE FIRED and CAN BE PROSECUTED if the company desires to pursue either. It can be regarded in court the same as STEALING anything else would be because you are claiming HARD DRIVE SPACE, PROCESSOR TIME, AND INTERNET BANDWIDTH for your own use and these things all COST THE COMPANY MONEY.

If you would like to use your companies computers for distributed computing clients find out first who the appropriate person is to ask, then send them a letter on paper and get a response on paper in order to be safe. Keep this for a record.

-I.M.O.G.

INTERESTING SIDE-NOTE: 22% OF EXECUTIVE-LEVEL MANAGERS REVIEW THEIR EMPLOYEES E-MAIL.

BTW none of these things have to be a serious offense, an offense is an offense and if the company wants to get rid of you for any reason, this will do.

 

[filip04]

yea yea yea, its in the other thread thanx

 

[flixotide]

Nice post... the letter that is...

Me

 

[emericanchaos]

At our school, and many others, they actually have techs on campus that know what they are doing. They blocked access to saving anything except IE temporary internet files on their hard drives. I can't even save an MS Word file in my documents temporarily without getting an admin notice "YOU MAY NOT SAVE OR INSTALL ANY..."

I say if you want to ask permission (and it's a rather large college or has a rather large amount of computer), make sure you do it formally (aka an actual letter, typed!) and ask one of the computer nerds in the school that's high up there in decision making. Ask him/her if they would give you permission to install these very small clients to take up all excess cycles, but not bog the computers down at all... yada yada. Tell them what it's for and the college you will be assisting.

Don't ask your professor (college) and don't ask your teacher (hs). They have no right to grant you permission, because it's not their call to give you that authorization.

But the idea to get permission and to put these things on all or even just a few of the computers at school/work is an excellent idea. There's a lot of work those things can do since all they do most of the day is just get used for office apps and internet. Hope those that have started already got permission. If you haven't even thought of doing it at school- go ahead and ask and give it a try!

KEEP FOLDING~
~JeFF

you can save into the temp directories. as long as the machine is capable of downloading i.e. viewing the web you'll be able to save to the hard drive. just have to make sure they don't flush the caches on you while you have something you need on it.

 

[Wedo]

.......
It NEVER hurts to ask, and respect the response.

Cheers, Flixotide

(praying that wedo will agree with me... )

How did I miss this thread? It's been a sticky since Clinton was in office and I've never read the whole thing.

YES! I agree, get permission, I do.

Wedo The Super Borger

 

[Arkaine23]

letter

Here's a modified version I just sent to my college's CS dept. Of course the formatting didn't quite take....

3/24/02

To the ACC Computer Science Department,

I am writing on behalf of the members of the Folding@Home community to bring the Folding@Home Distributed Computing project to your attention.

The Folding@Home project uses spare processor cycles to synthesize and calculate how proteins fold, misfold, and aggregate. The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious repercussions, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease.

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project, which in essence is a technique that uses the internet to create a tremendous super-computer. By splitting the workload and sending small portions out to volunteers who donate their CPU time, the project is able to harness tens of thousands of CPU’s and move forward more far more quickly than it would running on a Cray super-computer. The folding client runs on an idle priority and never takes CPU cycles that are needed for other processes. Think of a CPU’s cycles as a glass of water. When you browse the internet or process documents, you only drink 1/20 of the glass, and the rest is unused.... The folding client "drinks" the other bits of water. The client lets the other programs take as much as they need. This in no way spies on your activities. Studies have shown that Folding@Home does not impact the performance of computers, and it only needs internet access to receive work packets and to send results, which occurs anywhere from three times per day to twice per week depending on the particular work unit and CPU involved. Bandwidth use is minimal and it operates on standard www and https ports 80 or 8080. Many schools and corporations are starting to help the scientific community by joining this or similar projects.

If security is an issue with your decision on allowing the client to be installed, I can assure you that the F@H client is quite safe. It uses a digital signature that is verified with each download of a new work unit. The signature is a very secure way to verify that no bogus files have been downloaded that may attack/affect your system. The Folding@Home project does not cost anything to you. The school can form its own official team for stats tracking and can then compete against teams (even other colleges) worldwide. Your individual lab administrators may form their own usernames within the team and compete with each other. Clients are available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD.

You do not gain anything from folding, but science does and perhaps someday this research will cure protein disorders or find new treatments for some types of cancer, in which case the whole human race benefits. All in all, the client is free and uses very little hard drive space. You may find other uses for the client as well. In monitoring a few dozens of folding@home clients, I've found that they can help pinpoint hardware problems. The folding@home community and I hope that you will think about allowing this client to be installed on some of the school’s computers, even if only on a trial basis. Whatever you decide, I thank you for your time and consideration.

I urge you to seek more information about this exciting DC project at the official Folding@Home site: http://folding.stanford.edu
A free program to track folding@home clients across a local network can be found at: www.em-dc.com

Sincerely,

Troy Winter
[email protected]
Member of Team 32
Username OC3d

 

[flixotide]

Nicely written Arkaine... I think it is a very good idea if people post their different letters in this thread.

We all have our individual ways of expressing things, and adding the letters to this thread can be a good inspiration for folders.

Very good!

Cheers,

Flix

 

[captain_amd]

The www.em-dc.org link is broken, but there is a www.em-dc.com site. Is this the same site?

 

[filip04]

meant to be .com not .org....

but that's the site we were referring to

www.em-dc.com it is

arkaine, edit your post as many will just blindly copy it

 

[Arkaine23]

letter

Edited

 

[nerdlogic]

At our school, and many others, they actually have techs on campus that know what they are doing. They blocked access to saving anything except IE temporary internet files on their hard drives. I can't even save an MS Word file in my documents temporarily without getting an admin notice "YOU MAY NOT SAVE OR INSTALL ANY..."

I say if you want to ask permission (and it's a rather large college or has a rather large amount of computer), make sure you do it formally (aka an actual letter, typed!) and ask one of the computer nerds in the school that's high up there in decision making. Ask him/her if they would give you permission to install these very small clients to take up all excess cycles, but not bog the computers down at all... yada yada. Tell them what it's for and the college you will be assisting.

Don't ask your professor (college) and don't ask your teacher (hs). They have no right to grant you permission, because it's not their call to give you that authorization.

But the idea to get permission and to put these things on all or even just a few of the computers at school/work is an excellent idea. There's a lot of work those things can do since all they do most of the day is just get used for office apps and internet. Hope those that have started already got permission. If you haven't even thought of doing it at school- go ahead and ask and give it a try!

KEEP FOLDING~
~JeFF

Normally on a college campus with on-campus housing, they would turn you down because of the already-high network traffic. Mine did.

Soy

 

[Mark620]

Get Permission!!!

I was doing RC64 cracking and the Highest Cracker on my team lost his job no joke. he had hundreds of computers that he took care of at work. Now he cant get a job because of it

 

[False Christian]

I say what I like and do what I like. You will soon learn about this.

 

[RPM_Computing]

Well all I can say about the subject is all of the systems working for F@H are all of my own and f I want to put it on someone elses system I will ask them first..

I work for a company which has about 300Ghz of folding power... I was hunting around one day and found SETI@Home on every sytem. I never had to wonder why network acivity was soo slow and crappy most of the time. As much as it is cool to Fold and Compete in getting the most WU's complete before the next guy or gal, sometimes it's not worth it unless you contact the right chanels in the proper manner..

If you ever do plan on activating several cpu's in an office environment here may be a good way to do it.:

Write a proposal to the company management or ceo with specific details in your own words about what the project is/does and provide detailed specifications as to what rare "network activity may occure if failure were to happen (which may not be a good thing(e.g. heat and system down time or hanging of applications which bring down production time)).

I guess the point being from all of that is get permission first instead of facing the consequences first.

And on that note,

Have a good one all,

Rick.

 

[Kino]

wait... you mean i can actually get kicked out of school for installing F@H on one of their crappy k-6s?

 

[diggingforgold]

No but depending where you are at, if you abuse their acceptable use of technology agreement (or whatever they call it), you might not be granted to use a computer on their network/campus ever again.

At my old high school- if you got caught breaking any of the rules whatsoever, you were banned from using any piece of technology in the cities public schools.

At my college, once you log on- a scrolling contract appears. One rule is "no installing any software". But when a kid in my programming class got cought, all they did was slap him on the wrist and say "there was software found on that computer, don't install anything else again", and this was an informal warning.

If you get caught borging 3rd party software on their rigs, you may find yourself booted from use of their systems.

Anyway- every semester, college computers are usually formatted (at least they are at my school). So you would only be able to fold on them for a few weeks.

 

[Barnstormer]

Got it

 

[modenaf1]

what!?!?!!? you need permision!! i borged half the public comps in the country!!

JUST KIDDING

why do i have the worst humor?

 

[flixotide]

No but depending where you are at, if you abuse their acceptable use of technology agreement (or whatever they call it), you might not be granted to use a computer on their network/campus ever again.

If you get caught borging 3rd party software on their rigs, you may find yourself booted from use of their systems.

able to fold on them for a few weeks.

Sounds very humane. But I can assure you, plenty of schools in Denmark have much stricter rules on this subject, and companies even more so.

Thus I'd still recommened a very open dialogue and legal approach to the subject of installing software... some high schools, uni's etc. MAY be tolerant, others might not... The odds may be low on getting booted off campus, but its not worth the risk for something like folding!!!! So get permission!

So my advise remains, you risk loosing your place at your school, or your job... and thats too big a risk.

Cheers, Flix

 

[Melhisedek]

Why didn't I read the whole thread earlier :/

Well I asked for permission to borg PC I sit on at work but I think I did it very clumsy and got rejected form some IT-support gal that thinks she is pretty or something If only I had this letter. Right now I don't know what to do =) This folding is more addictive than overclocking! Especially when my rig is performing worse and worse under the load of F@H som I went from 261 FSB down to 256 ;(
...and every MHz counts...