SETI nuts - definitely off boat topics!

Sneaks":1xjyi1yf said:
Are there any SETI nuts out there in Brat Land using their computer's excess capacity in the Seti distributed processing network?

Don
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Not me. I avoid all us those things like the plague since basically your are giving a piece of software (the Seti client) permission to run on your computer and communicate with a server. While the client software is relatively thin (e.g. small) I don't trust that it is 100% secure. Yes, I know that the site says it's generally safer than the browser I am running but my feeling is that anything that allows data to pass into my computer is a potential source of buffer overflow viruses etc.

I'm especially concerned with code written at and distributed from academic institutions. I seen a lot of academic code and it often is not very pretty. I've also seen a lot of lax security at academic institutions which makes me leary about the servers which distribute the code getting hacked and distributing malware.

Finally, I'm a minimalist in the amount of stuff I ever have running on my machines. In general, the less stuff the less chance for conflicts and bugs that result in odd behavior. While these risks may be VERY small, if said software does not benefit me, why take any additional risk at all?

Just my two cents worth...

Roger on the SeaDNA
 
I'm with Roger on this. I don't run anything I don't know where it came from if at all possible. I also routinely go through my registry and clean it up. And I regularly bring up task manager and kill any process I don't recognize. It must work fairly well as my network here at home has been virus free for over 5 years now.
 
Interesting. Guess I've been lucky. My networks are behind a hardware firewall of course, but in over six years worth of crunching, I've never had any problems. Met some interesting people along the way since there's over five million crunchers out there now. Seti was the first attempt at distributed processing in this manner and the servers have suffered from hack attempts occasionally, as have most academic computer systems, but it's never affected the remote computers beyond just being unable to upload results periodically.

It must be the tin foil hats we wear. :wink

Don
 
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