I have a good computer and it took a few seconds to test each numbers it said it was testing. They were all three 5 digits even numbers…
Do_good.js
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: Do_good.js
#22I have a good computer and it took a few seconds to test each numbers it said it was testing. They were all three 5 digits even numbers…
No wonder, just look at the code: https://github.com/ben-eysenbach/do_good/blob/master/do_good...
Re: Do_good.js
#23Interesting. 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…
I accidentally created something like that some time ago. But using website do deliver the script is problematic due to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_origin_policy
Re: Do_good.js
#24This practice is deplorable.
It presumes that individuals have infinite electrical and computational resources, which is utterly false. This sort of computation is inherently going to degrade the functionality of computers, and will severely impact the quality of browsing on resource-constrained devices like Chromebooks (which is what I'm writing this on) while siphoning resources from me, wasting my time and money. It's this sort of degradation that compels people to use ad blockers. Excessive and superfluous resource use ruins the web.
Doing this surreptitiously as he suggests is outright predatory and is altogether reprehensible.
Re: Do_good.js
#25Why 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 JavaScr…
Of course, b and c are completely irrelevant as reasons why nobody built a business model around that.
Re: Do_good.js
#26Why 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 JavaScr…
Actually, there's this portuguese startup already working on something similar: http://crowdprocess.com
And they are solving very interesting and useful problems. Like for instance execute calculations that help firemen predict the direction of a fire front.
Re: Do_good.js
#27I have a good computer and it took a few seconds to test each numbers it said it was testing. They were all three 5 digits even numbers…
No wonder, just look at the code: https://github.com/ben-eysenbach/do_good/blob/master/do_good...
What? It's not returning 0 from isPrime once it hits a divisor? I think I wrote better prime-finding code in middle school.
Re: Do_good.js
#28I'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.
Sounds like a successful academic project but not so much for the industry. I'm hard pressed to find a company willing to use plain, publicly-available Javascript to write their number crunching algorithms. That said, I would loved to be proven wrong - good luck to you!
Berkley has a similar project going on where you can download a program that donates your idle CPU to their tasks.
Re: Do_good.js
#29This 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.
That's irrelevant. It's evident that, based on the ridiculous ads that some sites employ (auto-playing videos, those absurd scroll-by ads, etc.) that a lot of companies are willing to drastically degrade their user experience to profit. Who's to say that companies won't take 10% of your CPU, or 20%? Let's universalize this practice. 1% CPU usage in each of 25 tabs begins to seriously degrade the experience and waste tremendous amounts of battery life.
In fact, I'd say that it's only financially tenable to hijack larger proportions of one's CPU. In order for access to 1% CPU usage of an entire site's user base to be economical compared to cloud computing options, this form of computation would either need to be ridiculously cheap or offer a massive user base with untold devices in the computing apparatus. It just doesn't make sense in most scenarios.
Re: Do_good.js
#30This 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.
But it does, potentially, prevent my laptop CPU from sleeping and uses battery time.