Cancer busters turned 'paranoid yank saviors'?

As Vulture Central II Team Captain (oh the glory that title has bought me... the free beers, the women flocking, never getting given the wrong order a >Maccy D's....), I feel that it is my duty to inform theregister.com and its readers that United Devices have stopped using _some_ of our PCs for the purpose of molecular modelling to aid the discovery of treatments / cures for cancer.

In place of the cancer busting, our spare PC time is being used to find a treatment for the Anthrax toxin.
You need to check your particular PC, as whether you are running the Cancer busting task or the Anthrax one depends on which client you are using, and how you set up your "profile" on the www.ud.com site.

The Anthrax busting task can be considered a worthy cause. Anthrax DOES affect humans, and can be deadly.

But the purpose of this change from cancer to anthrax busting seems misguided. The purpose of changing the distributed computing task to finding a treatment for the anthrax toxin appears to be a knee jerk reaction to the terrorist activities of the last few months.

I see this as bowing to terrorists. If the people donating their idle processor time genuinely believe that Anthrax is more likely to kill them than Cancer then fair enough. American, you are. And you have allowed the terrorists to succeed, as they have bought unnecessary terror into your life.

If you find that you are running the Anthrax task, its fairly easy to revert to the Cancer task if you prefer.
Log in to www.ud.com.
Go to "My Device Manager"
Select "Profiles"
Click on your "Profile Name"
Deselect the checkbox saying "United Devices Anthrax Research Project"

When your UD client contacts the server to get its next allocated task, it will be a Cancer, and not Anthrax task.

As the 3rd largest team by number of members (2204) and the 4th largest in >CPU time (657 years and 71days), our processing matters. ®