Official Policies

Client Usage

distributed.net does not condone the unauthorized use of its software on any computer system. You may not run any distributed.net software on a system unless you own the system or have received permission from the owner to run distributed.net software. Running the client on a machine without authorization will result in your removal from the project and will disqualify you from winning.

By running a client and submitting blocks credited to your email address, you give distributed.net the right to post your email address on its statistics pages. distributed.net will never intentionally release email addresses in any other fashion without the address owner's consent.

Eligibility for Monetary Prizes

DCTI staff* are not eligible for any monetary prizes that distributed.net or DCTI may offer. In the event that a member of the DCTI staff* completes one of our contests, the money will go to the next non-staff person to submit work, based upon our master contest logs. If the non-staff person is on a team, that team will receive money based upon the percentages set forth for that contest.

Having a DCTI staff member on a team will not disqualify that team from receiving prize money should one of the teams non-staff members win a prize. The team may spend that money as it sees fit.

Outside of any specific factors mentioned above, each distributed.net participant is just as likely to win as any other distributed.net participant, dependent upon the number of blocks they complete. Your individual odds to win vary from day to day, proportional to everyone else's odds, depending on the current overall distributed.net rate. Much like the odds of winning a raffle depend on the number of raffle tickets sold, your likelihood of finding the key depend mostly on how many other people are trying.

*NOTE: In this instance, DCTI staff includes coders, porters, proxy/network operators and general administrative staff. It does not include anyone who is providing us with hardware and/or bandwidth to operate our network (masters and full proxies), unless they also fall into one of the aforementioned categories.

Project Statistics

While we welcome suggestions for new stats features, there are some things that will not happen. We will not transfer blocks from one team to another. We will not release information on what team(s) specific email addresses are on. Finally, we make no guarantee as to the privacy of your email address, except that we will never intentionally release it except through the stats system without the owner's consent. Moreover, you can decide to change the identity under which you appear on the stats server to keep your email address confidential. This feature is referred to as the List Mode and it is documented in our Statistics Tutorial.

IRC Channel Usage

Our IRC channel is intended to be a place for distributed.net participants to gather and discuss distributed.net, distributed computing, and technology in general. We generally do not limit discussions on the channel, but we will stop any activity or discussions that we feel are annoying or offensive to other users or are not in the best interest of distributed.net. This includes things such as use of color codes, spamming or flooding, away messages, solicitation, foul language, etc. We will automatically kick or ban anyone who is using away messages or spamming the channel. In general, be a polite guest, and everyone will have a better time.

Unsolicited Advertisement or Announcement

"Spamming" either on behalf of your personal team or for distributed.net in general is expressly forbidden. Mass-posting distributed.net advertisements to unrelated newsgroups is a very bad thing. Emailing people who have not expressed a prior interest in distributed.net is a very bad thing.

Sifting email addresses out of the stats database and attempting to recruit them for your team will not accomplish what you're hoping it will. Please do not even bother.

Engaging in such behavior makes us all look bad.

Stats Database Listings

distributed.net reserves the right to edit any public listing information made available on the stats database for whatever reason it sees fit, including but not limited to editing for content, or size. Profanity, lewd images, or oversize logos are all specific examples of items which may be revised/removed.

Reporting Abuse

If you wish to report an instance of abuse, please contact abuse@distributed.net or visit the email support form.