Hi there! First off, always excited to see an impact-oriented product post so great work to the makers. A question I have is how does this compare with other "grid for good" computing projects such as World Community Grid or SuperDonate?
@haleyparty Great questions! (Sorry for the slow response—took me a bit to figure out how to get comment access here.)
First, I'm a huge fan of many "grid for good" projects. However, I've found that many of them use quite a bit of your computer's processing power, and they almost always require some sort of registration process. I want my grandma to be able to use this (indeed, she does, bless her heart), so this project focuses more on the user experience—make it as easy to install and then as low-impact on the computer as possible. Most similar projects are also limited to helping organizations (often scientific ones) that need enormous amounts of computing power (for instance, for protein folding). Money tends to be more universally useful to all types of nonprofits.
This leads into your second question about the charity selection. They were chosen in large part because they accept payment via Dwolla, which allows the donations to avoid transaction costs. As the project grows, I'll definitely be looking to incorporate a wider variety of nonprofits, and to have more rigorous criteria than "I like them." For now, my focus is on getting enough users to make the charity selection actually matter in the first place. :)
Thanks a ton for your interest and support, and feel free to ask any other questions!
@ghobs91 Seems to be a bitcoin miner running in the background (generating bitcoins->dollars for charity). It's being tagged as threat as many apps mine bitcoins for themselves without the user consent.
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