Well, I thought I'd give it a whirl.

First, the installer is not digitally signed, and comes from an 'unknown publisher' - install at your own risk. I'm using a sacrificial copy of Windows on a spare, test, partition.

Second, this is not an upgrade from BOINC - it's a whole new application. If you have BOINC installed already, both programs could continue to run. Unless someone can decode this error message:


I'll keep prodding, and keep you posted.

Edit - not going to get very far with this. You need to fill in a (sacrifical!) email address, ask for a verification code, collect it from email, paste it in the signup form, and create the account. The timeout counter runs down from 30 seconds when you request the verification code: I got it pasted within, I think, 22 seconds at the fourth attempt, but it still rejected it as 'expired or timed out'.

Verification emails come from 'noreply@boinc.io', which, with the error message above, confirm that BOINC Planet, boinc.io, and sunet.cc are all the same organisation.

Edit 2: It won't go away! Every time I tell it to shut down, it immediately restarts!

Look what I found, buried a long way down the installation folder (C:\SUNET\resources\app.asar.unpacked\build\boinc_core\)



Note the date and version number.

Last one before I run out of edit time:


It installs this to autorun (without asking permission)

Well David claims everything is fixed now the servers have their certs updated, so that old client shouldn't have a problem with an outdated ca-bundle.crt - but for that all my Android devices still refuse to contact any of the projects with the updated certs.

Well David claims everything is fixed now the servers have their certs updated, so that old client shouldn't have a problem with an outdated ca-bundle.crt - but for that all my Android devices still refuse to contact any of the projects with the updated certs.

The SUNET install tree contains a ca-bundle.crt dated 10 February 2020, and it contains the AddTrust External Root certificate (though I haven't been able to check the expiry date yet *). The whole bundle is dated:

## Certificate data from Mozilla as of: Fri Jan 26 21:30:21 2018 GMT

* Yup - it's the 30 May 2020 expired one.

And it also has v1.0.2a of the OpenSSL libraries. We have v1.0.2s.

So the company has three names, you can't check what data it sends back unless you Wireshark all communications. I think the upside of it is that it still uses a BOINC client, albeit an old one with its own problems, but at least it connects to all projects by itself. Does it contact the projects with the account you made for it? What if you already have a BOINC account, can you use that for signing into this contraption?

No, I couldn't get that far. The first thing you're presented with is their own login screen (which is more like signing in to a phone/tablet app), and if you haven't got an account already, you click the 'signup' link - that takes you out to a browser to validate your email. With the results I described.

I've set the test machine back to normal BOINC crunching for now, but I'll keep trying to setup an account, and if I get one, I'll try their app again.

They have some advice for what to do if the email doesn't arrive: I get the emails, copy and paste the code, and all I get is this:

Just tried again to see how they were getting on, and got a big

504 Gateway Time-out
The gateway did not receive a timely response from the upstream server or application.

from their url.

Anyone know what they've morphed into this time?

I still think they secretly want you to type the extra 's'... yeah, look that one up. :D

Hmmm, something I didn't expect. The site is hosted by... drum roll: Alibaba.com (but then the Chinese setup, Google can't translate the page because it can't get there).

Nothing strange there - compare Western sites hosted by Amazon!

Edit - I still get a 504 error when trying to reach the home page. But I did get verification codes sent to a gmail address. Maybe Google encrypted them?

The Great Firewall of China can be The Great Painwall of China in any direction to the extent that something will not work one day, but works OK another. And given the current relations between the USA & China anything could happen.