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Finding MD5 Collisions With Chinese Lottery
Stanislav Shalunov writes "Jean-Luc Cooke posted a Usenet article describing a distributed webpage-based effort (Chinese Lottery) to find a collision in the MD5 function. All you need to do to participate in the effort is visit the URL that loads the code. The author comments: 'What is interesting about this approach - when we reach final release stage - is that any website that adds this small snippet of code to their pages will have their visitors working on the problem for the duration of their visit to the site'."
Perhaps we could tie this to some sort of micropayment system. You come do distributed work on my website, and you get to view it. Some third party pays me for the cycles, and I have a new revenue stream!
I respect the effort and ingenuity, but the rationale that "hey, we're helping solve a problem" somehow justifies stealing someone else's resources... it's just wrong.
Although letting visitors know about this would certainly seem nicer, I don't think I'd actually consider it as outright unethical.
For one thing, considering the number of websites out there that try to feed outright malicious code into our browsers, this looks very very tame by comparison. It uses a few CPU cycles, but has no long-term effects on the visitor.
For another, this seems no different that sending the visitor a few banner ads - Just a way of "paying" for the content. For most of the world, bandwidth costs far more than CPU time, so in effect, this "charges" the user less per visit than most advertisements. From some quick n' dirty calculations, the bandwidth for 35k of banner ads costs me 0.082 cents, while the electricity for a full hour of CPU time (on a PIII/933) costs me only 0.0045 cents... Literally 18 times more.
Finally, I can (and do) keep Javascript disabled in my browser. Advertisements, on the other hand, I do my best to block, but a few still manage to sneak through.
Once they have gotten this working, and assuming there is a commercial need for these cycles that exceeds the cost in bandwith, a site could do as others have suggested, and require you to run this app (ala netzero etc) in order to acess content on the site.
Beats pop up ads, anyway.