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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...
This will make an EXTREMLY slow computer, and if anyone out there knows anything about routing (which I am sure you do :) The time it would take to recieve and compile all of the data would take longer and require more bandwith than would be viable on the economy of scale.
Example --- need to send 4,000,000 packets out and recieve the TCP packet back.
To do this with any speed, and also to not lose a fair majority of packets, you have to have a huge backhaul.. (T-3, OC3 or larger) TCP will not continue sending packet so you will loses them. Cost for large backhaul. $4800 month, (as by what my company chages..)
4,800 x 12 $57,600
So for one year of a huge pipe to the net you will be paying 57,600 (through my provider)
This still will not fix latent packets that never get back to the user, or any other problems.. (such as someone on your network running bearshare and eating all of your bandwidth)
Now lets look at the amount of money used for that large amount of bandwidth.
$57,600 for the amount we could have spent on that line in one year we can build a beowulf cluster with 30 nodes (and that is being very liberal on the cost of the nodes)
Now, looking at the article that I read, it seems as if the computing style using TCP/IP is very very ineffiecint.
Personally, for the amount needed to make this work, on the scale of actually getting any real work done, I would much rather build a Athlon Beowulf cluster.
This looks like in reality this could only be implimented in the real world as a new type of DOS attack.
Blah Blah Blah.
I Have DONE THIS! I Did it years ago (steal cpu cycles remotely for local computational tasks in a distributed network manner without having account priveledges on any target systems)
,117 K-12 schools or school districts , 22 Local, state, and federal government agencies ,16 Healthcare organizations , 111 Libraries , 21 Other non-profit organizations ,28 Businesses . Most were Amdahl mainframes (IBM clones).
Many unitversities in the 1980s used the MERIT network and many still do.
A feture of MERIT allows logging onto any other system from another system and during a login process a free command line feature allows use of the CALC calculator line command.
This exotic command would only work for a while before they severed the line after about two minutes, unless you finally logged in validly so they could charge you the 9600 baud access fees.
The calculator command was great. It allowed a truly dumb terminal to do simple math functions. Other 1980's terminals such as Liberty Freedom Ones and other terminals have built in desk calculators modes.
You can use the calculator function to do multiplication and other operations without owning a system account. It even worked during modem connections and tou could tie up several connections by "hopping" during a login.
I created tools to use the math functions of the MERIT network to perform computations FOR FREE.
Merit is a private, non-profit corporation, governed by thirteen of Michigan's four-year publicly supported universities. In addition to the thirteen members there are 230 affiliates with a combined total of 425 dedicated network attachments from 398 separate locations. Merit affiliates include: 85 Colleges and universities,25 Community colleges
Stealing free cpu cycles of innocent target machines as a parasite to perform complex computational tasks of a larger state machine, using network protocols is fun, especially if distributed across multiple systems and limitless.
I proudly did it first in the early 1980s.
(I have a life though and achieved many other more useful things by the way)
F.E.