:: 28-Dec-2003 12:44 GMT (Sunday) ::

OK, I’ve gotten as tired of waiting for retires to be tested as everyone else
has, so I’m just going to enable it. I highly doubt there will be any problems,
but I do have a backup of all the important tables as of a few minutes ago,
just in case.

You might want to avoid editing anything for the next day or two, just in case
we uncover any issues and have to revert to the backup.

:: 15-Dec-2003 21:15 GMT (Monday) ::

Just an update on the status of the problems we’ve had with AV vendors lately.

McAfee has clarified the wording during detection and the entry on their site
to clearly state that distributed.net client is simply a piece of software
that has in the past been installed on computers through use of trojans. They
explain how to identify if the software was legitimately installed. They also
mention that the option to detect “possibly unwanted” applications is not on by
default.

Norton has also removed the signatures that were identifying dnetc.com as a
trojan.

:: 06-Dec-2003 22:49 GMT (Saturday) ::

Many new clients that were previously on the pre-release page are now
available on the official download page. Please see the update page
to see the list of updated platforms:
http://www1.distributed.net/download/updates.php

Also some personal proxies that were previously on the pre-release
page are now available on the official proxy release page:
http://www.distributed.net/download/proxies.php

:: 05-Dec-2003 10:36 GMT (Friday) ::

It’s been brought to our attention that now McAfee is also detecting
our software as a “possible unwanted program”. We’ve contacted McAfee
requesting that they look into it and should have this resolved shortly.

We’ve also made progress on having Symantec remove us from their
definitions and it looks like the next set of definitions released
next Wednesday should have the signature for dnetc.com removed.

I’d like to thank Jonathan and Ben Newman for their assistance as well
as the support staff at McAfee.

:: 25-Nov-2003 13:48 GMT (Tuesday) ::

If anyone running external stats needs the mapping between new and old teams,
it’s available at http://stats.distributed.net/new_team_id.csv.

:: 25-Nov-2003 09:51 GMT (Tuesday) ::

There was a bug (http://n0cgi.distributed.net/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=3504) that
was preventing old team work from being properly re-assigned.

I’ve fixed the stats-proc bug, but now I need to re-process the past ten
days to make everything correct. I think this can be done without actually
re-processing all the work for those days, but I’ll have to dive a little
deeper before I’ll know for certain.

:: 20-Nov-2003 10:58 GMT (Thursday) ::

Stats didn’t update last night. I should have everything working again in an
hour or two.

:: 19-Nov-2003 17:21 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Sorry, that url should be http://distributed.net/~decibel/stats.tar.gz

:: 19-Nov-2003 16:00 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Team creation is turned on. :)

The last thing to do is turn on retires. This can’t happen until we can test it
on a non-stats database, and this is where you can help!

You can find the stats code-base at http://distributed.net/~decibel/stats.tar.gz
Grab a copy and install it on a box with PostgreSQL. Run
stats-sql/build/build.sh to install the database on your PGSQL server. Point
the config at a set of pproxy logfiles (you’ll need to be using daily or hourly
rotation) and get the statsrun to work. :)

Obviously it’s not that easy, otherwise we’d have done it by now. We’re looking
for help to first document the process, then make it less painful. I don’t
think there’s any huge surprises or gotchas; anyone who can read Perl can
probably figure things out (but I’ve been working with this code for years, so
I’m probably not a good judge of that ;) ).

If you do decide to help, please join the stats-dev mailing list; submit
questions, findings, patches, etc. there.

Now that we’re using tools that are readily available to everyone, I hope
that people will come forward and help tackle the bugs in bugzilla as well
as implement new features. There’s certainly things that we’re working on
internally too (such as using GUIDs as user identifiers instead of email
addresses), but I’m sure everyone knows how slow our development can be at
times. Hopefully many hands will make light work and we can move on to fun
stuff like subteams. :)