Charity software

webfork · **Posted:** Sun Jun 19, 2011 1:23 pm

We've discussed donating to developers here on the site, but I wanted to post about software that's strictly charity-related.

Donating unused processor cycles

Superdonateis a very new program that I haven't seen any actual charities endorse yet, but its a great idea.
There is of course Folding@Home, which tries to solve a major problem in biology behind a variety of illnesses.
Many other scientific applications

Donating your browser searches

Dorosia the same way that Mozilla Firefox (and many other browsers) make their money can be redirected to other charities.

Know of any others or have a recommendation?

m^(2) · **Posted:** Sun Jun 19, 2011 1:56 pm

Dimes:
http://netdimes.org/
It maintains a map of the internet.

In short it uses your computer to find and maintain network paths near you. It's very compute and network unintensive, does 1 measurement per quarter IIRC, it's enough because network rarely changes nearby and effectiveness drops greatly with distance.

guinness · **Joined:** Mon Aug 27, 2007 2:00 am **Posts:** 3727

webfork, if I remember correctly weren't you somehow connected with Folding@Home, because I remember on your blog (KitchenSink) seeing it somewhere!?

webfork · **Posted:** Sun Jun 19, 2011 2:35 pm

guinness wrote:

webfork, if I remember correctly weren't you somehow connected with Folding@Home, because I remember on your blog (KitchenSink) seeing it somewhere!?

If by connected you mean I advocate its use, yea. You're likely thinking of my email address, which uses that name.

guinness · **Joined:** Mon Aug 27, 2007 2:00 am **Posts:** 3727

Yeh that was it. Thanks.

m^(2) · **Posted:** Wed Nov 30, 2011 3:55 am

Bringing back an old topic, but I think it's the best place to put it:

Quote:

YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world's users.

Click.

dany · **Posted:** Wed Nov 30, 2011 7:58 am

Donating unused processor cycles:
BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) of course: http://code.google.com/p/boincportable/
I personally haven't tested it because well, BOINC has some serious disk usage and read/write ops which imho doesn't make it suitable to run from a flash drive. Currently I have an old IBM machine crunching away at work-units 24/7. Still, a stable, portable version would be great, another app less to install...
Off-topic: Just checked and ignoring all the windows stuff, I got just 7 other programs installed, the rest is all portable

webfork · **Posted:** Wed Nov 30, 2011 12:55 pm

m^(2) wrote:

YaCy ... is fully decentralized

On the subject of distributed search engines, I used and really liked Faroo (the results I tested were as good or better than Google), but the installation and interface were crap. It might have gotten better, but I like that Yacy is open source + GPL, and you can test it (albiet a limited demo) without having to install the client: search.yacy.net

m^(2) · **Posted:** Wed Nov 30, 2011 9:26 pm

Thanks for the list. I hoped to see something that is cross-platform, open source and is not GPLed on it, but no luck.
YaCy still looks like the best option for me.

Charity software

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