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The Biggest Cloud Providers Are Botnets
Julie188 writes "Google is made up of 500,000 systems, 1 million CPUs and 1,500 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bandwidth, according to cloud service provider Neustar. Amazon comes in second with 160,000 systems, 320,000 CPUs and 400 Gbps of bandwidth, while Rackspace offers 65,000 systems, 130,000 CPUs and 300 Gbps. But these clouds are dwarfed by the likes of the really big cloud services, otherwise known as botnets. Conficker controls 6.4 million computer systems in 230 countries, with more than 18 million CPUs and 28 terabits per second of bandwidth."
I can't even figure out how they got to 230 countries. The UN has 192 members, Wikipedia lists 203 de jure and de facto states.
Oh my God! The Botnets are creating their own countries!
The fact is that most Windows users firstly don't care what runs on their computer, and secondly don't use even a non-negligible fraction their computer's power.
Suggestions have been made, by frustrated sysadmins, for a "destructive" counter-virus, a large-scale attack that cripples botnets by destroying infected computers. That's not only morally wrong but also just impractical - the average computer user just buys a new computer, and all the virus does is destroy property to satisfy lust for vengeance. Value is lost.
A more practical idea may be to re-purpose this vast resource of free computing power and put it to better use than churning out advertisements. A botnet worm could instead hook these computers up to a grid computing project like Folding or SETI, or distributed file transfer, cloud storage, providing uncensored communication to authoritarian countries. The worm could at the same time inoculate computers against more damaging viruses and botnets. The user gets free protection instead of the overpriced crud by McAfee & co; the world gets free computing infrastructure, the internet gets less spam. Everybody gains value.
It would be like a very lenient security tax - for letting their computers pose a risk to the network at large, users donate a share of their computing power/bandwidth for the good of society, at no real cost to themselves.
(And yes, the obvious ethical dilemma here is whether it is morally wrong to manipulate a person's property without their knowledge or consent, even to their own benefit. This suggestion takes a strict utilitarian perspective, which doesn't always lead to the best option.)
Probably a bigger problem is that not many useful problems are "embarrassingly parallel".
Sending spam is. DoSing a victim is. Brute-forcing passwords is.
It's unfortunate, but a lot of problems of interest to unethical people are indeed embarrassingly parallel. :(
here you go. you made me curious. http://www.filibustercartoons.com/allcountries.htm