[deccan]

Originally posted by Jack Simth:
Yes, the risk is actually pretty low - most programmers produce code that is extremely difficult to exploit, and most organizations don't do stuff to your machine that you aren't willing to deal with. And then there is Microsoft, Gator, and numerous others. Yeah, it's a pretty low-risk, but the risk is there.

With something like Folding@home, I'd say that the risk is less that they'd try to do something nasty on purpose, than with any bugs in their program that they'd inadvertently missed, particularly since it's the kind of program that's built to automatically send chunks of data back and forth across the internet without user intervention.