Greetings everyone,

We have updated our certificate on the website about a week ago. This version of the certificate is valid until July 2020. It is also backwards compatible with clients 6.10. If you are contributing to another project that updates their certificate that does not support the older clients, you will need to upgrade your BOINC client to support them. Also, the BOINC community is currently working towards version 7.10.

Thanks,
-Uplinger

I agree that it is about time a newer client was made available for download (to fix my bugbear of incorrect Win10 detection) but I also understand that it's not that simple to just replace the download, well technically it is, but knowing that WCG is run by IBM there will be a number of processes which would need to be followed and things they take into consideration.

These would include comprehensive testing and security audits of the BOINC code as well as the third party libraries that are used. (Having said that some of the libraries in use in the current WCG client, e.g. libcurl, are old and have some known issues). They also consider impact on large install bases, like universities or large corporations, who only allow the install on the understanding that the code is secure and only communicates with WCG.

The customization is there to clearly identify the WCG version of BOINC (with a skin) as well as to protect their installed users. e.g. I know one of the customizations is to change the URLs used to check for and download new versions of the BOINC client. These are both changed to WCG URLs. I know that BOINC have pushed some clients in the past that had some big problems, I haven't paid much attention recently, but as WCG have full control on their client that hasn't happened.

I guess right now the team is probably working hard trying to onboard new climate change projects and while they are aware the client is getting old the saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is probably in their mind. Ultimately the existing client works for the WCG projects for most people without issue so why rush to change it.

We are actually working on adopting a new version of the client now. The main reason for updating is the new auto-attach feature which works really well and will reduce the steps involved in installing and setting up the client.

It is harder for us to adopt the latest version of the client then it is for BOINC to release a new version. This is because we have the IBM security teams review the software and that usually generates a few items to resolve (almost always low risk, but good to address anyway), we complete a open source review process to do some due diligence work to make sure that the software is being true to its license and we do some additional testing beyond the standard BOINC testing. The effort involved in these means that we only do this work as needed.

The quality of the client produced by BOINC is good and we have no concerns about our users using it. However, the version that we make available for download on our site, recommend to partners that are doing internal mass installations, deploying internally to IBM, etc needs to have these additional steps take so that we are able to have high confidence in it as a stable safe version of the client.

I tend to think of our version as a Long Term release where the BOINC version is the more frequent release.

BOINC 7.8.3 is not downloadable anymore: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_all.php

But 7.10.2 is & works just OK with WCG...recently upgraded on one computer, so that I can stop GPU crunching when the PopCorn or GOM is playing movie.