On Sep 25, 2009, at 10:54 PM, Rytis Slatkevičius wrote:

> I can and will only respond about the trojan and file downloads issue.
>
> McAfee is basically marking all applications that are packed using  
> UPX packer for executables as malicious. It is a nice tool reducing  
> application size quite significantly and saving on download size,  
> thus saving project bandwidth. However, it seems that malicious  
> software authors are also using it, and therefore McAfee has marked  
> the apps as suspicious. What's annoying is that being "suspicious"  
> means the file will be completely gone...
>
> We have tried to contact them, but it wasn't successful. Therefore  
> we went ahead and rebuilt executables without using UPX (ant it  
> cleared the problem), but we could only do that for some subprojects  
> (LLR based ones), because the other apps were built by outside people.
>
> On the other hand, BOINC is trying to redownload files of old  
> application versions that have been removed by antivirus. It is  
> probably being done because no newer app version has been sent to  
> your host yet. BOINC rescans the data folders on startup looking for  
> the files it knows should be there, and when it does not find one,  
> it is redownloaded. I am not exactly sure of the reasoning for it  
> though - why not redownload only if there is work that needs the  
> files?

Well, at least the people that needed to know about this know about  
it ... which is all I wanted to do ...

But I think the last point is still the most important one.  Why did  
BOINC D/L a bunch of files when I am NNT and have no PG tasks on hand   
and haven't for a couple months.  And I am reasonably certain that I  
was not signed up for many of the sub-projects for which I think BOINC  
was tying to get exe files for.  I mean, I was only running a few of  
the sub-projects, I think 3 or 4 because I have had too many crashes  
of the longer running models historically (and I don't know why that  
is true either) ... basically if the sub-project took more than an  
hour or so to run I was opted out ...

I suppose I should just drop PG ...

But I will point out that whether I do or not, having a virus pop-up  
because of a behavior of BOINC doing something like this is not  
conducive to convincing a novice user that BOINC is safe ...  
especially for a project in NNT state ...

Thanks for the feedback Rytis.
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