Welcome to Curly Brackets' BOINC Page

At the beginning of March, my virus scanner began to complain about a trojan on the site of my BOINC team, BOINCSynergy. The problem was, I could no longer access the web site, my scanner blocked it completely.

I could, however, still access their message boards, so I complained there after a couple of days, when the problem still had not been solved . I was not the first to complain, I found that others had also noticed that something was very wrong. But the forces that run the team site did not see the problem and thought it was all the problem of those who complained, respectively their virus scanners.

It has to be said here, that I joined this team many, many years ago indeed - at a time when it was still called SETI Synergy (and had just been renamed from Flinder's University or something like that) - and I had many friends in the team in those days - and we all had a lot of fun together. But as we all grow older, some of us tend to lose interest and so did not only lots of my friends there, but also the founder of BOINCSynergy, who stopped looking after things a while ago and handed over administrational matters to some of his team mates, who should now have been looking after things. Tracking down problems on the web site seems not to be in their scope, neither has anyone ever bothered to do some upgrades on the CMS of the site or on the board software. So it was only a matter of time until the site got hacked and unfortunately it stayed hacked. Nobody knows what to do, it seems.

Now I don't want to be part of a team that accepts an infected web site. That and the fact that their statistics for SETI@home have been broken for months and nobody is able to do something about it, made me stop and ask myself what I was sticking around. Loalty?

Well, when one is handled like a complete nut when one is pointing out serious problems, loyalty is hardly an issue. So I started looking around and finally - after some tries - I decided to do my crunching elsewhere and joined up with Team Picard.

Originally I thought about returning to Synergy when they had sorted out their problems, but when I replied to someone elses post on the board (who complained exactly about the same problem as I had) and said I had left the team for exactly that reason - well, imagine - the complete thread had been deleted next morning.

Goodbye BOINCSynergy - rest in peace. Fullstop.