Distributed Computing Program Hidden in Kazaa

The_THOMAS writes: "A federal securities filing Monday revealed that the hugely downloaded Kazaa P2P (file sharing) software contains a piggyback program which will create a second, new, network controlled by Brilliant Digital. They plan to awaken the software, already on millions of computers, within the next four weeks. The program will be used to host and distribute other companies' content and may be used for distributed computing. Read the details here."

Comments

reminds me of an old saying

[flynt]

P2P = good
Distributed computing = good
p2p + distributed computing = bad.

This reminds me of something my dad once told me regarding his school lunch as a boy. Just because kids like spaghetti, and kids like peanut butter, doesn't mean they'll like spaghetti and peanut butter.

Re:reminds me of an old saying

[Crazy Diamond]

You can pick your friends. And you can pick your nose. But you can't pick your friend's nose.

Applied to P2P this would be:

You can pick your peers. And you can pick your computations. But you can't pick your peer's computations.

Re:Revenge

[Jester998]

As an alternative to your idea, the article stated that the software will be automatically "updated" to allow new features... once the data starts flowing, I wonder how hard it would be to, ah, "submit a patch". :)

I'll _finally_ have my beowulf cluster. :)

- Jester

There's a subtle logic at work here

[circletimessquare]

There's something tricky going on here that is not immediately apparent if all you do is look at and knee-jerk react to this story:

I download Kazaa. I download Kazaa because Napster doesn't work anymore. Napster doesn't work anymore because the music companies say it rips them off. I don't care about ripping off music companies. But that makes me think: I can see how I'm ripping off artists. Gawd I love Kazaa! But I feel bad about ripping off artists.

BDE through Kazaa wants to use my computer cycles? Well geez, I feel bad about getting all this great music for free... I owe somebody something... Oh alright, that's a fair exchange.

The power of guilt.

Mark my words, people will accept this barter, except for one small problem: the artists still aren't getting paid!

BDE is getting away with murder: benefiting off of artists by proxy, and benefiting off of consumers, through guilt.

Re:URL! Always look at the URL!

[mister sticky]

jeez, april fools day has turned all us slashdotters into a bunch of cranky, trust-no-one cynics.

oh wait..

Like this:

[shepd]

Allow me to explain by example.

void main()
{
doDownloadFiles();
doUploadFiles();
doSpyWare();
doDistributedComputing();
}

becomes

void main()
{
doDownloadFiles();
doUploadFiles();
/* doSpyWare();
doDistributedComputing(); */
}

Sure, it takes a high-school CS student to figure out what to comment out, but once its re-compiled and distributed on KaZaa, the modified version will spread like wildfire.

If the license is truly open source, this wouldn't even be illegal (not that KaZaa users really worry about that anyways).