About Charlies Web Teams

(Or A Not-So-Brief History Of Charlies Web Teams)

There might not have been a Charlies Web had I not bought a new digital camera sometime in 2000. Photography is something I showed a knack for since before my teen years. Lacking "serious" equipment and never developing my own film didn't prevent me from showing a keen eye for
	composition or taking the occasional great shot! Along with my new digital Kodak camera came a program I knew nothing about, so it just sat around unused for several months. It turns out, this thing, this program called Trellix allowed a user to create a personal website and to publish it to specific web publishers.

Updating Trellix removed some of the publishers (the dot com bubble had burst by now) and there remained but two choices.
(You can read more of Trellix history here, and a post about my trials and tribulations with it here!)

	Around this same time, still intoxicated from all the "free" stuff I was finding, during a search for screen savers, I found the original SETI@home program. Science and Astronomy had also been interest of mine and this seemed like the perfect fit for me.
I also found one, doing medical research called United Devices.

United Devices, along with the regular research, started something called "Patriot Grid" whose goal was to identify new leads for vaccines or cures for agents known to be potential bio-terrorism weapons. Following Sept. 11, 2001 it felt like a duty as U.S. citizens to participate though it probably didn't occur to many of us to question why a British University (Oxford) was handling this research.

Members of Folding@Home should recognize these images of proteins. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Check out a 2001 PCMAG story about UD

Nor did it occur to many of us to question what was being done with the research and findings we were supporting.

There was no way to know then, but I was about to get an education in several areas of computing ... including malware! * * * Several things happened around this time, including the purchase of my first new "modern" computer. Up until this time, my computing experience was limited to used machines with a variety of 486 processors, running Windows 95 and a used laptop with a Pent II loaded with Win '98 and 64MB of RAM (underpowered!), with which I did the bulk of my early SETI and UD work. I ran into an article somewhere that spoke about (in the writer's opinion) some questionable practices about Grid.org and United Devices that left me wondering, "Was any of this true?" After some research on my own, I decided that it was only partly so, but following some unpleasant experiences within the United Devices forums, I decided to not participate any longer.

The problem, as I saw it, occurred because although the effort was sponsored philanthropically by United Devices, Grid.org was a for profit entity. A closer examination of the Patriot Grid component showed the Anthrax Research Project being funded not by the U.S. Government, but by the Department of Defense!	See also: In-silico Screening for Anthrax Toxin Inhibitors Dep't of Defense News Release
This raised many concerns, founded or not, about what would happen to all the results. As it was, some Anthrax research was halted when word got out, primates were being unethically euthanized following Anthrax exposure in order to minimize infecting other animals.

(to be continued...)