Hackers Spawn Web Supercomputer On Way To Chess World Record

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."

Comments

Re:Cheap

[Mathness]

It actually could be a fair exchange of resources instead of ads, I use some of yours when visiting your site and "consuming" your work and I give some back by doing some "work" for you. If what I provide is a reasonable use of my resources, I would have no problem with it as long as it is legal.