Do_good.js

This is wasteful of people's electricity and inefficient at the same time. Opting people in to wasting their battery life or raising their electric bill is treating users as a means rather than an end.

Re: Do_good.js

#5

Post by pliu » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 9:33 PM UTC

Hijacking my cpu without my consent is not doing good. There is nothing good about that.

Re: Do_good.js

#6

Post by bce » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 9:35 PM UTC

pliu wrote: post #5

Hijacking my cpu without my consent is not doing good. There is nothing good about that.

yep, I probably should have named it "less evil."

Re: Do_good.js

#7

Post by aroman » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 9:39 PM UTC

Interesting. I wonder if anyone has built (or it would make any practical sense) a distributed silent bot net not for DDoS of websites but rather of math.

Imagine a small, otherwise-benign virus which simply spends some of your CPU cycles cracking something. Computers are pretty fast these days. It'd sure be easier to brute-force attack a password with thousands of average computers than one big one.

(I realize it'd probably be vastly easier and more practical to simply buy cloud-based CPU cycles, of course.)

Re: Do_good.js

#8

Post by jakub_g » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 9:40 PM UTC

panopticonymous wrote: post #3

Or just mine bitcoin with that spare CPU. Works great on mobile devices! http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/07/esea-2/

That's how I first learned about bitcoin few years back. I've visited some forum and noticed Firefox started taking 100% CPU suddenly. Quick analysis of site's resources showed the admin included a third-party script for mining bitcoins.

Re: Do_good.js

#9

Post by dangrossman » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 9:40 PM UTC

Why nobody's built a startup around this already:

(a) There's no money to be had. A company that offered to solve your distributed problems using distributed JavaScript could only charge as much as the spot price of buying EC2 instances. Otherwise, you'd just buy the EC2 instances and solve it there. A problem not amenable to solving with temporary machines wouldn't be amenable to solving with times slices of JavaScript running on webpages.

It would take millions of page views to get the CPU-time equivalent of an hour running compiled code on an EC2 instance. That means the eCPMs the company could reasonably charge, or pay its publishers hosting the code, are thousands of times less than they earn from advertising.

(b) It's a net negative for the economy. Distributing work through JavaScript on webpages is an involuntary donation from employers/schools moreso than the person behind the computer. That extra expense with no gain for the business/school has to be made up somewhere -- higher prices or lower wages/employment.

(c) It's a net negative for the environment. The problems could be solved faster on bare metal with server-class hardware, concentrated in data centers built where energy is the cheapest, usually because there's solar/hydro/wind generated nearby. Solving them on desktop/mobile CPUs, in an interpreted language, powered by coal-generated electricity, would be a waste you'd measure in tons of CO2 that didn't need to be released.

Re: Do_good.js

#10

Post by Mahn » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 9:42 PM UTC

bce wrote: post #6

pliu wrote: post #5

Hijacking my cpu without my consent is not doing good. There is nothing good about that.

yep, I probably should have named it "less evil."

This isn't "less evil" either, this is taking advantage of the unaware visitor resources without his consent; if I found a site doing this I would think it's downright malware.