Number one rule: Even if you have permission to install software on company/not owned computers, get permission, in writing as the claim was made that a past administrator gave approval. BOINCing does use bandwidth and needs firewall/proxy passage where in place. WCG does not like the bending of rules... if found out to be un-approved it gives the distributed computing world a bad rap as a whole.

Mind you, how would the school directors have reacted if this Nez had been running an actual humanity benefiting science? Still un-approved!

"Nez", the IT man who installed this on the network, has the #1 amount of points in SETI@Home, and #5 globally for BOINC. Quite a bit of processing power has been under this guy's control. A search of google yields, "who is nez?...Some claim he is a god"

I'm looking forward to more information coming out about this. I do feel that the article(s) I've seen paint this situation in a bad light, making a joke out of the search for extra-terrestrial life.

In fact the "cost to fix it" is the cost of re-organizing the whole mess, of which the uninstallation of BOINC will probably account for a much smaller amount ("It will take at least a year to fix all of the issues, Birdwell said").

Articles in two local newspapers which show that SETI is essentially what is used to make attracting titles...
Higley firing tied to alien-search software
Higley: IT boss in trouble for alien search, porn

Zeni7, one of your comments jumped out at me most...

"... it makes me sick to think of all the school and work computers that could be crunching and instead go to waste."

I bet it makes most school districts and companies sick to think about their electric bill if every computer they own was running at 100% cpu usage all the time crunching projects.

A while back I asked my work if they'd be interested in becoming a WCG partner and running WCG on all their 1500 or so computers. The CEO wrote back to me saying while he encourages grid computer on one's personal computer, as he himself participates in a grid project at home, he had the IT department do some math and calculated running WCG at work on all machines 24/7 would cost the company an additional $71,000 in electricity per year. That's actually a lower number than I came up with in the estimates I did after getting his reply, but it's still significant enough for me to understand his answer.

Is tantamount to theft in my opinion.

The guy was essentially stealing both hardware and resources for his own ends.

Robbing his local taxpayers in the process.