I got a Trojan report the other day indicating my DNETC client contained a Trojan. For those who don't know DNETC (or the Distributed.net Client) is a 'folding' program that uses the extra CPU cycles of a computer to attempt to break an encryption algorithm. Now - this isn't a bad AT thing, as what it is doing is testing the viability of encryption. It actually gives you a pretty good idea as to how reliable it is, when a chain of 10s of thousands of CPUs take several years to break the encryption. And in the end the user of the machine which does break it gets a small financial award...

There are several other things out there that use CPU cycles. One of the more popular ones is the SETI (Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project, which attempts to analyze tons of data pulled from radio satellites aimed into space. There's also others, that attempt to analyze disease & genomes and the like.

The whole concept is there are millions of computers out there which generally are left on during times when they aren't doing much, so these programs use the computer that is sitting there doing nothing & proceeds to perform these computations. Essentially getting better than super computer calculations out of CPU cycles that would otherwise go unused.

At any rate, I had assumed the Trojan warning was indicating my DNETC executable had become infected with a secondary virus of some kind. I realized today, after my 4th attempt to re-download it, that Trend Micro isn't reporting that there is a Trojan attached to it, rather that it is in fact a Trojan...

TROJ_DISTNET.A

There is of course a major problem here, as I have been running DNETC on my work system for years. You see, my work computer stays on all night doing very little, so I use the extra CPU cycles to run the client (tied to my screen saver). That was until a couple days ago, as Trend Micro will no longer allow me to run it at all. I cannot even download it at this point...

Nice...