:: 06-Sep-2003 17:00 GMT (Saturday) ::

There is a new Solaris-x86 client on the pre-release download page.

:: 06-Sep-2003 16:51 GMT (Saturday) ::

Just a few notes about ongoing maintenance:

– http://cvs.distributed.net/ has been upgraded to use ViewCVS instead
of CVSWeb. This fixes a number of bugs (such as annotate not
working) and offers new functionality, such as cvsgraph imaging.

– Last week the fetch@ and flush@ email block services were updated to
filter their inputs through SpamAssassin and make use of some
procmail filters to allow a bulk of the spam/worm messages to be
ignored. This should hopefully reduce the amount of emails that
random people have been seeing due to forged “From” headers.

– Last week, unfortunately also due to increased spam/worm mails, the
help@ address was updated to no longer automatically pass messages
through to the help desk mailbox. Upon mailing that address, you
will receive a reply that includes some common answers, and a
description of where you should send your message if you have a
question that is still not answered.

:: 29-Aug-2003 00:38 GMT (Friday) ::

I’ve added a couple new clients on the pre-release page (NeXT and
NetBSD) and moved two earlier NeXT clients onto the release page.
http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php
http://www.distributed.net/download/updates.php

There have also been a couple of reports of unauthorized client
installations in combination with a root kit, so I’ve added another
entry to: http://www.distributed.net/trojans.php

Naturally this type of behavior is very unacceptable and causes a
great amount of effort for those who need to rebuild machines that
have been compromised in this way. So please restrain yourself to
only running out client on machines that you have proper authorization
and permission to do so on.

In other news, as of this weekend the keymaster is now filtering old
OGR blocks from clients from version v2.8014 or earlier (as per my
previous plan).

:: 13-Aug-2003 17:34 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Everybody wish a happy 21st birthday to dbaker@distributed.net, our
favorite scapegoat!

There are a couple of new release candidate clients for NeXT and
Digital Unix on the pre-release page. One of the earlier release
candidate clients for Digital Unix was also moved onto the formal
download page.

An updated round of personal proxies will probably begin to be made
available in the next week or so.

You may notice some more OGR24 stubs circulating out every now and
then. There’s only a few percent of the stubspace remaining, so we
hope to be able to get it finished up soon.

We’re also very close to finishing distribution of the second RC5-72
subspace (out of 4096). The block return rates have been 80.50% and
67.52% so far for the two.

We’d also like to ask everyone to check their machines with older
clients and be sure a version higher than v2.8014 is being run
(v2.8015 was released around May 2001). Although OGR results from
these older clients are currently still being accepted, they have
diminished mathematical value to us. Additionally, a large majority
of traffic that we are continuing to get from those old versions
represent unauthorized worm deployments of our client. Because of
these reasons, in the next couple of weeks we may begin blocking
traffic from these older versions and instructing them to shut down.
If you still have machines running one of these older clients when
this is done, it may cease running and contributing to your stats.

:: 12-Jul-2003 14:52 GMT (Saturday) ::

Two new Tru64 prelease clients (one non-threaded release candidate,
and one multithreaded beta release) are now available on
http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php
As always, report any issues you find with these versions in Bugzilla.

:: 23-Jun-2003 02:41 GMT (Monday) ::

Some new client binaries have been moved onto the formal release page:

* SCO UNIX [5.x/x86/ELF] v2.9005.484a
* Tru64 UNIX / DEC UNIX / OSF1 [Alpha] v2.9005.484
* Solaris/SunOS [Sparc/Ultrasparc] v2.9005.484
* NetBSD [PPC] v2.9005.484
* Linux [Alpha-ev5/ELF] v2.9003.481
* OS/2 [x86] v2.9005.484b
* Mac OS X/Darwin [PPC/OS X] v2.9005.484

See http://www1.distributed.net/download/updates.php

:: 25-May-2003 22:30 GMT (Sunday) ::

Several new clients have transitioned from the pre-release page to the
official download page. You can check out the list of newly available
clients on http://www.distributed.net/download/updates.php

Additionally, some new pre-release clients have also been made
available for early testing on our pre-release download page:
http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php

Some users have reported that the latest McAfee anti-virus 4266 DAT
file update inappropriately classifies dnetc.com as being a trojan.
We have already contacted them about this issue but we are still
awaiting their response on this matter.

Just another warning that full conversion of the rest of our mailing
lists (including rc5@, proxyper@, and announce@) from majordomo to
mailman will be occurring very soon. There is no need to be alarmed
when you receive an email welcoming your subscription to a list that
you already thought you belonged to.

:: 12-May-2003 15:43 GMT (Monday) ::

A new MacOS X client has been put on the pre-release page for testing.
It is expected that this version should fix bug 3186. Additionally,
there is a new OS/2 time-limited beta on the pre-release that should
fix bug 1345.

:: 06-May-2003 16:37 GMT (Tuesday) ::

We’re currently in the process of migrating our mailing list software
from majordomo to mailman. It is expected that the change will give
us improved backend manageability and flexibility of the mailing lists.
Mailman also provides better bounced message handling, and a web-based
interface that people can use to subscribe and unsubscribe.

Although we are trying to keep the mailing list subscription lists and
configuration settings as close as possible to the existing majordomo
operations, there are a few changes that will immediately affect our
list subscribers. In particular, you may find that you need to update
your mail program’s filtering/sorting rules if you use any.

More details will be provided as they become available.

:: 05-May-2003 02:07 GMT (Monday) ::

More than twenty client builds have been transferred from the
pre-release page to the official release page. Please see
http://www1.distributed.net/download/updates.php for the list.

A handful of new pre-release clients have also been added to the
pre-release page for early testing by the courageous.
http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php