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Do_good.js

ben_eysenbach.neocities.org

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11–20 of 57 posts

Re: Do_good.js

#11

Post by martin-adams »

This only really works if idle time is considered wasteful, but it's not. Electricity, battery life, cooling all come into effect. And to make a real squeeze out of those spare CPU cycles, JavaScript probably isn't the best choice.

There is also a bandwidth cost of delivering the application and sending the results.

But having said that, yes there is a cost, but there could also be a real gain for that cost. Replacing adverts with CPU cycles only changes the nature of paying indirectly for something. There should always be an easy way to opt out and users should know it's happening.

Re: Do_good.js

#12

Post by krapp »

aroman wrote: post #7

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…

More interesting (but evil) would be to split the difference and just sell the cycles you're hijacking as a service.

Which is, yes, of course just kind of reinventing a botnet. But I could almost imagine this being part of the cost of using a website (again, evil) in lieu of seeing their advertising. Of course said site would have to be unusable without js.

And of course, sites would just farm your cpu and serve the ads anyway.

Re: Do_good.js

#13

Post by UberMouse »

afhof wrote: post #4

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.

It's not even using 1% of my CPU. It checks one prime every 100ms, so it doesn't really use a lot of anything.

Re: Do_good.js

#14

Post by cldr »

Reminds me of the recent posting that talked about an employee that got fired from a game company because he added code to the game to mine bitcoins without users' knowledge. Not a good idea.

Re: Do_good.js

#15

Post by namank »

I'd much rather donate CPU processes to advertisers than donate screenspace to their ads.

Ok, but do the advertisers want you CPU processes or your screenspace?

Re: Do_good.js

#16

Post by bce »

namank wrote: post #15

I'd much rather donate CPU processes to advertisers than donate screenspace to their ads. Ok, but do the advertisers want you CPU processes or your screenspace?

valid point, I should have said that I'd rather sell CPU cycles to some tech company than sell screen space to advertisers.

Re: Do_good.js

#17

Post by jakub_g »

martin-adams wrote: post #11

This only really works if idle time is considered wasteful, but it's not. Electricity, battery life, cooling all come into effect. And to make a real squeeze out of those spare CPU cycles, JavaScript probably isn't the best choice. There is also a bandwidth cost of delivering the application and sending the results. But having said that, yes there is a cost, but there could also be a real gain for that cost. Replacin…

Imagine having 20 tabs opened solving stuff in background. Although modern browsers slow down the JS clock in the inactive tabs, it's still a killer for the CPU. The new equivalent of having adverts playing loud music and render video in 20 tabs (the music will be emitted by your CPU fan).

Re: Do_good.js

#18

Post by dangrossman »

UberMouse wrote: post #13
afhof wrote: post #4

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.

It's not even using 1% of my CPU. It checks one prime every 100ms, so it doesn't really use a lot of anything.

The script was just a proof of concept. A scenario where you could be paid to donate 1% of your CPU time while certain webpages were open will never occur. Here's why:

Let's say there exists a problem where it's worth paying to solve it like this. The most a company could pay you is just below the spot price for buying instances on EC2 or some other cloud/cluster -- or they'd do that instead. So we're talking about nickels and dimes per hour for the equivalent of 100% CPU time on an EC2 instance.

If you donate the equivalent to 1% of that computational power, the most you can earn is hundredths of a penny per hour. You could run the script for a week and make a penny, while spending more than a penny on extra electric. That's no net gain for you, and no meaningful work done for the script author -- so this script would never have been written.

Re: Do_good.js

#20

Post by xSwag »

do_bad.sh

  for i in {1..9999};do curl -v --data "n=$RANDOM&result=$RANDOM" http://arcane-sea-9808.herokuapp.com/update/?callback=;done
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