SETI@Home Expanding Goals With Sun's Help

[Mr.Guvernment]

slashdot

(sorry if this is old )

Posted by simoniker on Thursday December 18, @07:21AM
from the company-not-large-flaming-object dept.
GabeK writes "The Register is reporting that the SETI@home project is going to be expanding the scope of their project with the help of Sun. Sun is donating a fleet of servers to the SETI@home project for use in its new BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project. This project will use Sun's new JXTA peer-to-peer protocol for distributed computing, and will add other functions to the project other than looking for little green men. Users will now be able to dedicate slices of their idle time to projects other than SETI, like cancer research and climate mapping." We previously mentioned early word of BOINC a couple of months back.

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/12/18/0025230.shtml?tid=102&tid=185&tid=187

 

[TC]

Sounds promising

 

[gusgizmo]

Most definetly, but i'm starting to get concerned about the BOINC project, privacy wise. I read an article talking about the project managers being able to invisibly update your BOINC client. I don't know the merits of this, but it is kinda concerning. I don't let Microsoft do it, and I certainly wont let BOINC do it.

Also whats up with the PTP concept, I don't like this either. Oh well, if I dont like the project when it's released, I just wont run it.

 

[TC]

I can understand your concern, but you have to look at it from their point of view too. With the current project if they made an important fix they had a hard time getting everybody switched over to a new binary. This will help them by auto updating key components of the operation. Unfortunately if you don't like it that doesn't leave much in the way of DC projects to participate in since FAH and the cancer project are switching to the boinc framework also.

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

^^^ but i am sure many people will disect the client to see just what is in it and if any "spyware" of info is being sent out.