Slashdot Mirror
Parasitic Computing
b0r0din writes: "CNN has this article about a way to force computers to solve complex computational problem using the checksum algorithm used by the TCP/IP protocol. For more technical details, see their website." You probably thought learning TCP/IP was useless. No! You can use it to make an extremely inefficient computer...
Is it legal to steal someone else's computing power without their knowledge or consent? I know I wouldn't want it happening to me.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
...but hardly anything but a proof of concept.
"Below, we present an implementation of a parasitic computer using the checksum function.
In order for this to occur, one needs to design a special message that coerces a target server into
performing the desired computation."
What I can't find is any proof that computing this specially designed message is less computationally intensive than actually running the TCP checksum yourself. What is the actual scaling factor achieved? You must still design one of these special messages for every iteration of the NP complete problem you're trying to solve...
Anyway, other than the TCP checksum, are there any other protocols out there that do something more computationally intense to the data before returning it?
Yeah, it's inefficient. That's not the point.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....