Hackers Spawn Web Supercomputer On Way To Chess World Record

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday June 4, 2013 @11:21AM from the distributed-computing-now-with-more-distribution dept.

New submitter DeathGrippe sends in an article from Wired about a new take on distributed computing efforts like SETI@Home. From Wired: "By inserting a bit of JavaScript into a webpage, Pethiyagoda says, a site owner could distribute a problem amongst all the site's visitors. Visitors' computers or phones would be running calculations in the background while they read a page. With enough visitors, he says, a site could farm out enough small calculations to solve some difficult problems. ... With this year's run on the value of Bitcoins — the popular digital currency — security expert Mikko Hyppönen thinks that criminals might soon start experimenting with this type of distributed computing too. He believes that crooks could infect websites with JavaScript code that would turn visitors into unsuspecting Bitcoin miners. As long as you're visiting the website, you're mining coins for someone else."

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Cheap by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-04 11:23 · Score: 5, Funny

Better than looking at ads.
Why stop there... by socceroos · 2013-06-04 11:26 · Score: 3, Funny

Lets just load a monolithic OS kernel written in javascript into visitor's RAM with the full OSI stack. Distribute your website to these small OSs and have them serve everyone else in the local network....
Re:How to block ? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-04 12:06 · Score: 2, Funny

Insert smarmy statement regarding how long I've been running noscript here