Charity Engine

[NeoGen]

As AMDave confirmed this to be a legitimate (although uncommon) boinc project I have edited the post and removed all text formatting as to not make it jump out on sight so much.

My apologies for the early judgment on it



Hey guys,

I just found out a sort of a boinc project called Charity Engine - http://www.charityengine.com/

This thing seems to be an account manager rather than a project really, as I went to the website and clicked to join, it asked me to register but on the next step for the boinc instructions it was very specific that it wanted me to add it as an account manager.

I though that was strange but just for the heck of it I went along and did it... next thing I know boinc attached me on 3 different projects with a username "ce4295" and started downloading dozens of megabytes of workunits. :icon_neutral:

At this point I was thinking "HELL NO!!", and I got myself removed from it and kicked the projects out. (They were Einstein, Rosetta, and Malaria@Home)

And the reason I did that was because I felt I lost control of my own machine, whoever this person/institute/website is just took over my machine and had me crunching whatever they felt best.

I can't tell if this is a legitimate "project" but it looks more like a crafty scam to look like a charity project and scam people out of their computing cycles by using a proxy server... I bet the results submitted are being rebranded and sent back to the respective projects under someone else's name.
A tell tale of a scam is right on their main page, as it seems that out of nowhere they come up with large sums of money to award people randomly... No boinc project that I know is so financially well that they can give away money to people!

I don't know what to do next, but I would like for us to help stop this scam!


EDIT: If it happens that I am wrong on my early judgement of this website, I will apologize in writing... but I will need to see some concrete proof of legitimacy first.

[AMDave]

I got an invite email a while back, and I thought the same as you to begin with. But they appear to be above board.
http://www.companiesintheuk.co.uk/ltd/the-worldwide-computer-company

They are in fact legit members of the IDGF ( http://desktopgridfederation.org/members#Charity )

They appear to have some sponsorship deal going in the background, hence the prize pool.

But yes, it is a BOINC Account Manager installation very much like GridRepublic so you get little choice about what gets run.

It's not for us, but for the odd person out there who supports one or more of the charities (which is probably quite a few) they can crunch some work and feel good about it without account admin, team memberships, recognition of work done etc.
It's ok for them. It is another path, but it is not the path we choose.