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"GoogleFah.exe is trying to send "Mike's SSN" to 171.64.122.14x [my firewall] detected an attempt to send your U.S. Social Security number to a remote site. The address of the remote site does not match your Trusted Site information, so [my firewall] has blocked the transmission."
YIKES! This goes against G's statement of:
"No private or personally identifiable information is communicated by this feature to Google, Folding@home or any other beneficiary of the Google Compute project."
What the heck is going on here?!?! I looked up the IP and it belongs to:
OrgName: Stanford University Network
OrgID: SUN-5
Address: Pine Hall, Room 115
City: Stanford
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94305-4122
Country: US
You can see where Pine Hall is, and what it does here:
[campus-map.stanford.edu...]
Do you think it's some snot nosed college kid trying to abuse the program?!?! If so, how could Google allow it's code to be tampered with and not know about it?! If word of this goes mainstream, especially around IPO time, it's gonna hurt! I can't think of a single person that will be Google Computing if the program is requesting thier SSN be sent! This didn't happen just once either... the warning kept popping up until I told my firewall to ignore it and not send anything to that IP.
I can't find a way to uninstall G Compute, only to turn off the button. Guess I'll be removing the toolbar, scrubbing the files, and then I'll consider reinstalling.
My trust in the toolbar, and GOOGLE itself has been seriously damaged! And they are saying that Gmail won't gather personal info either...
And I thought I might be wasting my money on the "Pro" version of my firewall!
We see this in the world of intrusion detection systems (IDS) all the time, with a network port or sequence of numbers in "normal" network traffic happening to match the signature for an attack. That's why all IDS has to be manually reviewed by a real person for sanity.
Hold on.. I found an official response that we've sent out in the past--other SETI@home projects have seen this as well. Here ya go:
The reason for the problem is that the firewall (Norton Internet Security in particular) looks for sequences of numbers matching private information, e.g. credit cards, etc. This sometimes accidentally matches the data in the Folding@home work units, which contain a large number of numbers representing atomic positions. Other distributed computing projects, such as SETI@home have also encountered this problem (see [setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu...]
Although the benefits of such functionality from the firewall are somewhat short-term (since hackers will quickly adapt to Norton Internet Security, and send the data in a different format), if you wish to leave it enabled on your machine the best way to minimize clashes is to configure the firewall so that it looks only for 7-8 digit combinations rather than 5 digit ones. The 5-digit setting will sooner or later misidentify data from a number of programs, and will prevent them from functioning correctly.
Please let us know if configuring the firewall to check for longer number sequences still does not solve the problem.
So: no, we don't want your Social Security number. Man, posts on WebmasterWorld are feisty these day. :)
So: no, we don't want your Social Security number. Man, posts on WebmasterWorld are feisty these day.
Well, I get awfully gunshy when something says that any personal info is being transmitted.
Since the concensus is that the number is random (my computer worked on this a LONG time) I guess I'll drive on with my Google Computing.
<sidenote> I'm gonna be a little miffed if I find out some smart college kid found a way to abuse the system, but the explanation sounds logical enough for me. </sidenote>
Thanks for ya'lls help!
If you click on that link above, you'll see we've got over a dozen CPU's cranking away on the project and we're shooting up in the rankings - the powder2glass team always appreciate new members contributing to our effort.
