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jethroted of the
macrumours team developed a .msi installer for ease of
deploying Folding@Home on the many machines he says he has at his
disposal. Somehow this installer got into the wrong hands and
ended up being used to install the Folding client on unsuspecting
peoples computers via the internet. This has caused somewhat of a
stir at Stanford and for very good reason, this is a quote from
Vijay on the
macrumour forums yesterday.
Hi,
I just wanted to give your team a heads up on what's going on here
out of respect for all of your contributions to F@H. There will be
an official message tomorrow, but I wanted you to get advance
information and hear it from me directly, rather than second hand.
Our logs prove that Jethroted's installer has gotten released way
out of control on about 1000 CPUs that he clearly does not have
the authorization to use (the IPs are scattered across virutally
every different possible ISP). The large number of clients did not
show up in the stats pages since all had the same MachineID.
Also, upon examining the installer, it has several aspects whose
only goal is to fool the unwitting downloader into thinking that
the Adobe install failed, but gives no information about
Folding@Home. This is more than an .msi file which "somehow" got
released to Limewire, etc. This has all the looks of a
well-crafted plan. If you have any doubts, check out his installer
for yourself. This is a very different situation than simply a
team's specific installer, but something which can get people into
very serious legal trouble and bring discredit to the project as a
whole.
We have stopped all of Jethroted's clients and more measures will
be announced tomorrow. This is clearly an extremely strong
violation of the EULA and Stanford is internally investigating
this (independent of and beyond the control of my team). We have
to make sure that something like this never happens again and we
will take the appropriate measures to discourage this.
I won't go into further details just now, but I can predict that
many of the people on the team will consider our planned measures
(TBA tomorrow) unfair. However, considering that the EULA was
violated in such a strong manner, I think that points are the last
thing that one should be worrying about at the moment. People have
been convicted in US courts for lesser infractions.
Jethroted has been mostly open about this and I am sympathetic to
him, but that does not make up for the damage that has been done.
For example, if a script kiddie hacked into Stanford's medical
school and unintentionally scrambled the records, that would still
be a very serious violation (even if no harm was intended, these
actions are based on what was the outcome and the means of the
infraction).
Again, I wanted to tell your team directly early out of respect
and thanks for all your contributions. You'll hear more tomorrow.
I am sorry I can't be visiting your fine forum with more positive
news. and today we have this
As
many of you know, recently there was a very significant violation
of the Folding@home license agreement by a Folding@Home donator.
He hid the Folding@home client software within an installer and
roughly a thousand people have been tricked into installing
Folding@home without their consent. This is a severe and direct
violation of the agreement.
Our logs prove that this installer has gotten released way out of
control on about 1000 CPUs that he clearly does not have the
authorization to use (the IPs are scattered across virtually every
different possible ISP). The large number of clients did not show
up in the stats pages since all had the same MachineID.
Also, upon examining the installer, it has several aspects whose
only goal is to fool the unwitting downloader into thinking that
an Adobe install failed, but gives no information about
Folding@home. This is more than an .msi file which "somehow" got
released to Limewire, etc. This is a very different situation than
simply a team's specific installer, but something which can get
people into serious legal trouble and bring discredit to the
project as a whole.
Upon consultation with Folding@home donators and the moderators of
the Folding Community Forum, we have decided on the following
course of action:
1) All the clients involved will be turned off remotely by
Folding@home (Stanford). This will end any unwanted use of these
machines.
2) In order to rectify the unjustified points and impose a
punitive measure which shows the significance of this infraction,
we are zeroing out points of the account involved.
My team will cooperate with any legal investigations into this
situation and the University may consider legal actions. That
decision is not mine to make.
_________________
Professor Vijay S. Pande, PhD
Director, Folding@Home Distributed Computing Project, and
Assistant Professor of Chemistry and of Structural Biology,
Stanford University
The thread in our
forums can be found
here
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