Towards an Internet-Scale Operating System

gschoder writes: "Two Berkeley computer scientists (including David P. Anderson of SETI@home) envision an Internet-scale operating system to harness the processing power, networking efficiency, and storage capacity of everyone's computers. Scientific American has their proposal."

Comments

Sounds like Freenet II

[Sanity]

In the 1999 paper "A Distributed Decentralized Information Storage and Retrieval System" which formed the basis for the Freenet project, the following future direction is suggested:

Generalisation of Adaptive Network for data processing
A longer term and more ambitious goal would be to determine whether a distributed decentralised data processing system could be constructed using the information distribution Adaptive Network [Freenet] as a starting point. Such a development would allow the creation of a complete distributed decentralised computer

Guess there is nothing new under the sun.

Stealing from the poor and giving to the rich

[b.foster]

Let me preface this by saying that work related to SETI@home, the Human Genome Project, and politically motiviated cypher cracking is a Good Thing(tm) and should be preserved.

However, the proposed ISOS is big, powerful, and likely to be sought after by the most powerful corporations and institutions on the planet. How much lobbying would a large drug company need to do to get more than its share of distributed processing power? How much money would the U.S. Government need to give to them to use the system for cracking "terrorist" messages from the "evil ones" like Kevin Mitnick and Bernie G? How much money would the Government need to give to them to use the system for spying on individual users? Remember, this is the same government who pays Hollywood to put anti-drug themes in their sit-coms, so what would they not be willing to try?

The end result of this, then, is that ordinary computer users will be forced to subsidize (through the use of CPU cycles, electricity, wear and tear on hardware, and memory use) the efforts of large companies and governments who are working against their best interests. So, tell me again... what would we gain from this?

Bill