SETI@home: ZoneAlarm

ZoneAlarm Pro causing unexpected stats behavior

April 21, 2004

Users who have ZoneAlarm Pro installed on their systems may be experiencing weird behavior when trying to look up their user stats on our web site. Instead of getting their own stats, they get somebody else's.

If this is happening to you, it is probably because you have ZoneAlarm configured to prevent your e-mail address from being sent out from your computer. If this is the case, any time ZoneAlarm sees your address in outbound traffic, it replaces it with a bunch of asterisks (i.e. "name@address.com" becomes "****************").

SETI@home doesn't check for valid e-mail addresses when users sign up (something that is fixed in future releases). As it turns out, there are several users who have signed up with addresses like "****************". So these are the accounts whose stats you end up seeing because ZoneAlarm converted your address before it got to our web site.

In order to prevent this from happening, open up the ZoneAlarm window - in the "ID Lock" section, on the "Trusted Sites" tab, all SETI/Berkeley servers have to be set with a green check in the "Access" and Key Icon columns. Then your e-mail account will pass safely through to us (but nobody else unless you select those servers as well).