Aside from all the bashing these guys are getting
here for not having any working code, this kind of database would actually be quite a good idea.
One main problem for anti-spam is this: humans are
very good at telling spam from legitimate messages. Comupters are nowhere close. Why not? Well, humans are simply better at certain types of problems like pattern recognition because of centuries of evolution. But there are ways around this: genetic algorithms and neural nets are two that I can think of. Both of these are "learning"
strategies and need large databases to get started. We're talking about billions of messages or more, not the hundreds that you get everyday.
So the kind of database (one for spam, one for non-spam) that these guys are talking about would be an excellent way to develop intelligent spam-detectors.
Sorry if this is unpopular opinion, but we are against legal and in favor of technolgical solutions for most of the problems of the internet, aren't we? Then why are we waiting for anti-spam legislation to fall like manna from the sky?
The best way to fight spam is using technology. Methinks this is a step in the right direction. So get off your ass and contribute. Forward your spam to them. Think of clever algorithms that can make good use of a large database. And code them. And submit patches. Isn't that what open source is for? Hey, may be this is going to be a killer app for open source, considering how big a problem spam is going to be in the next few years:)
Even I know how to buy a domain name and write a few paragraphs of text on a white background.
But you didn't, did you?
This is a/. worthy story?
You're missing the point. The story is not on/.
because something revolutionary has been done, but
because the huge number of/. readers can get together and create a useful database. Obviously it would be no good if no one knew about it. In a sense, the story is worthy because it got on/.:)
Kind of a reverse Catch-22, if you like.
What you can do:
Help them implement their automated spam review scripts. As with any project, they need volunteers.
Make sure you send them a copy of all the spam you receive. From their page: SpamArchive.org's efficiency is proportional to the amount, quality, and variety of spam that is provided. End users can forward known spam to submit@spamarchive.org.
The explosion of spam is in a way similar to population explosion -- looks life-threatening at first sight but is actually something that will stabilize over time.
Game theory gives an insight to what happens in the long run.
Consider a population of peaceful creatures. If there is a mutant creature that is agressive, it will have an advantage over the peaceful creatures, and will multiply. But soon, there will be enough
agressive creatures that they will start to fight with and kill each other. Thus the populations of both peaceful creatures and aggressive creatures will stabilize. Such situations are well-studied in game theory; the resulting steady state is known as a Nash equilibrium .
It is early days yet for spam; that is why spammers are so successful and predictions based
on extrapolation of spam based on the current growth rate are unnecessarily alarmist. But soon there will be so many spammers that spamming no longer guarantees a profit. The ratio of spam to total mail will stabilize, and spam filtering technology will mature so that the vast majority of spam will never reach the user. Sure, spam will be a minor inconvenience, but no more than that.
For a long time, there were doomsday predictions
of the "web as we know it". The pessimists
claimed that the signal-to-noise ratio was
constantly decreasing and that things would soon
degrade to such a point that it would be untenable.
Well, what happened? The link structure of the web
serves to greatly amplify useful content on the
web and filter out noise (so neatly exploited by
google).
This is only the latest in a long line of articles
saying "spam is increasing at an exponential rate. So in X years Y% of our time will be spent deleting SPAM. E-mail is doomed!!!". This author, for example, says nothing of
bayesian spam filters .
What is likely is that spam and anti-spam will both mature in a few years, and that a combination of filtering methods will weed out most junk from
our mailboxes; users will have so problem
manually sending the handful of remaining penis enlargement offers to/dev/null.
what online comics really need is hosting that doesn't whack them into oblivion with bandwith charges when they get popular
Yes, this seems to be one of the major problems
for online comics. Here is
a tutorial describing how you could reduce bandwidth
consumption pngs for comics and several tips for
effective use of pngs.
From the article: Used correctly, PNG can drastically reduce the file size and download time of one's comics.
I think that's true for most people using Yahoo's mail service.
I don't know. For me, for instance, it isn't.
It's a bad idea to use a service like yahoo as one's primary e-mail address. When some website that wants to spam me asks for an e-mail during registration, I give my yahoo address. I also use it for subscribing to some mailing lists which I read when I'm bored. I once found yahoo mail it useful when I was on vacation and my ISP didn't have a web interface. But not much else. I use my ISP's e-mail account with my friends and relatives and my account in university for most other things. So if yahoo says no more free access, I'll just say ta-ta.
It doesn't take a finance wiz to figure out that they could become a pay service any day. About a year back, I used to put some stuff bulky up at geocities as backups. Then they removed ftp access and forced you to go through their stupid web interface which had some restrictions on file sizes. So I looked for other places, but also learnt my lesson: don't trust any freebie providers on the web. I made sure I didn't use my yahoo account for *anything* that I cared about after that:)
Don't believe it! Its a big conspiracy... CmdrTaco has been bought. WallsRSolid works for Acer. Those 150 "hardcore linux users" were M$ employees with borrowed penguin T-shirts!!! I _knew_ they'd start something like this the moment Linus left for his cruise... This is MS FUD at its best!! I'd rather believe that RMS is cheering for Bitkeeper. Chant with me: "This is a Conspiracy, this is a conspiracy, this is a conspiracy..."
Umm.. I'm not sure about this exponential extrapolation thingy. By the same logic, they would be supporting something like 120 architectures by 2006:-)
Pennies to us, but to them it could take a lifetime to acquire that amount of savings.
I live in India, and I what you say is simply not true.
You're missing the point that not everyone earns close to the average salary. An Indian
"middle class" family (such as mine) could easily have an income of Rs. 50000 ($1000) per month.
(That's > 25 times your average!)
True, the percent of affluent people is small,
but in a country of a billion people its still a large number. I don't mean to troll, but slashdot seems to have the general attitude that India is still a country of snake charmers and tightrope walkers. Get over it. While a majority of the population lives in poverty (and consistently gets screwed by self-serving governments), there is also a large, educated, wealthy technically minded workforce.
Actually, the reason the simputer took so long to take off was that its creators initially focussed on the wrong market - the illiterate masses. No company came forward to mass produce it and only the intervention of the government saved it from dying out altogether. But now that it has gotten off the mark, I think there is a very good market for it out here.
When big companies get hit a few times like this
corporate America will start to see the point that
there's really no one who benefits from the patent
system the way it is right now. But doing away with
patents altogether won't find any takers, as someone's pointed out. Still, this is a good time to start a serious campaign for patent reform. Some checks and balances should be built in, along these lines:
Anyone about to release a product submits a description of it to the PTO; patent holders who think the product infringes on their patent has a month or 2 to file a complaint and prove the infringement. The onus of looking out for possible infringement lies enrtirely with the patent holder.
A patent holder can not be allowed to sit on a patent indefinitely and prevent others from using the invention. To this end, a patent holder must produce proof that s/he is working to commercially exploit his patent if s/he wants to hold on to it for more than (say) 10 years.
I'm not sure if these are practical to implement the way I've put them, but you get the idea.
Of course I don't think anything of this sort will happen in the near future, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight.
In his book
"Computer networks", Andy Tanenbaum
describes this ingeneous method that the Chinese Govt. could use for DES cracking
(by brute force, searching through all 2^56 keys):
Every radio and TV set in China comes equipped with a chip that searches through a portion of the keyspace assigned to it; when one of them hits it beams up the answer. Now just imagine! If the dragon used spare cycles for cracking DES, and a billion Chinese used the chips, DES can probably be broken in hours:)
It might be true that diagnosis is easy most of the time, but incorrect diagnosis can be far more dangerous than, say, ineffective relationship building. Let me share a personal experience: When I was a kid, I was afflicted with contraction of the oesophagus. At first I was finding it hard to swallow solid foods. The family doc was a bozo who couldn't diagnose it, said I was perfectly fine and prescribed a placebo. Soon my condition deteriorated to the point when I could not even drink water. On my second visit the doc ordered endoscopy or something of the sort, where I would be made to swallow a tube equipped with some kind of probe so that my interiors would be examined. Fortunately before that horror materialized, I consulted a more experienced physician who had seen a similar case before, and I was cured in a
couple of days.
If not for the second doctor, my life would have been in serious danger. Of course, the software cannot replace the doctor. But it can certainly make the "easy things simple and the difficult things possible", as Larry Wall would put it. I envisage a further possibility: If such a software/database were freely available to the general public, the patient could get questioned by the software at home and email the results toi the clinic before visiting, saving consultation time. Just a thought.
The example protocol messages that they have given includes a SHA1 integrity check. SHA is the secure hash algorithm, a cryptographic standard. A cryptographic hash is a map h from the set of all bit strings to strings of length k, typically 128. The map h has the additional property that it is intractable to produce two strings (or files, or whatever is being signed) x and y such that h(x) = h(y).
Habu: In mating problems, called Tsume Shogi, the computer is already superior to the best players. In normal games, however, the computer is still far from the professional level. Its level can be compared to a 4-dan among amateurs [approximately 2300 strength in chess Elo terms. The first dan among professionals starts after the amateur 6-dan. To get a rough idea, the best Shogi players in the world, including Mr Habu, have a ranking of professional 9-dan - JL].
This is one example of the prevailing sad state of affairs of the performance of AI in games. The best chessplaying programs are those which use
brute force search and little else. The fact that they can beat world champions tells us little except that the effective branching factor in chess is small. In games like go and shogi where the branching factor is much higher, long-term strategy counts much more, and brute-force is relatively useless, computers are nowhere near the best humans.
Another example: As early as 1962 Samuels wrote a
checker playing program which could learn from its previous games and beat reasonably strong humans. After that there has been virtually no progress in game strategy; all the improvement has been in hardware speed. Indeed, it wasn't until 1994 that the first wold-champion-beating checker player,
"Chinook" was written.
This is an amazingly slow rate of progress compared to other areas of computer science/technology.
Its a shame, considering that game playing is thought to be one of the easiest problem domains for AI.
RMS's claim is that GNU software constitues the major part of the OS and the linux kernel just happens to fit in; hence it should be GNU/Linux.
Now, there are 2 ways you can define the OS
a) OS = kernel
==> GNU code = zero
b) OS = kernel + system utilities + windowing
system + distribution
Well, in that case we should really be calling it GNU/Linux/X-window/GNOME/KDE/RedHat (or whatever distro).
Forcing people to say GNU/Linux is just twisted logic and ideology.
Yeah, he did *exactly* the same thing at a talk I attended. I guess he always gives the same speech wherever he goes. And he made the audience repeat
"The Operating System is called GNU, and Linux is but one of its kernels" or something like that. BTW, I can't imagine how even an ideologist can have the patience to pronounce gnu-slash-linux all the time:-)
So, the average family income in India is Rs22,050. That's Rs424/week to live on, so downloading 10 songs will use a quarter of their weekly income. Ouch.
Hmm... If you think the math is so simple, you are sadly unaware of some facts of life in India. The point is that the wealth distribution is ridiculously skewed. For instance, my family is "middle class", and the *monthly* income is about Rs 50000, about 30 times your
average. Admittedly a small fraction of the population, but keep in mind that this is a country of a billion people.
The "average" family has never used a computer and probably never will.
Many have pointed out that it is very easy to
forge e-mail. Just for reference, here's how you
do it:
[~]$ telnet localhost smtp
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.localdomain.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 localhost.localdomain ESMTP Sendmail
8.11.2/8.11.2; Sat, 16 Mar 2002 23:08:12 +0530
mail from: god@heaven.org
250 2.1.0 god@heaven.org... Sender ok
rcpt to: arvindn@localhost.localdomain
250 2.1.5 arvindn@localhost.localdomain...
Recipient ok
data
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
From: god@heaven.org
I've been watching you. Your fly is down.
.
250 2.0.0 g2GHcKT32482 Message accepted for
delivery
quit
221 2.0.0 localhost.localdomain closing
connection
Connection closed by foreign host.
And that's it. Of course, replace localhost.localdomain with the intended recipient's host and domain.
The mail from: line is for sendmail to verify
the sender's domain and the second From: line will be interpreted by the recipient's MUA.
If I want to factor a large prime or predict the weather, I might have hundreds or maybe thousands of otherwise idle computers available to help with the task.
Oh my God!! You want to put thousands of computers to factoring a large prime ?:-)
The insight one gains from reading the article is,
of course, not that all developers should drop
whatever they are doing and rush to develop The OS
Which Will Cure All The Ills Of The World. Nor would it be possible for the desktop user to make any money in the manner described: if computing became so cheap, the cost of processing the transfer of money would far exceed the value of the computing time contributed.
The message is that P2P could indeed be the killer app for the desktop that linux is waiting for; world domination is indeed possible if only we are a little more inventive. What OS is best equipped to support massively distributed computing? *nix, of course. Windows users already have a hard time protecting their machines from the internet. What we need is more robust P2P protocols designed with security and scalability in mind.
In the meantime, check out distributed.net:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from all the bashing these guys are getting here for not having any working code, this kind of database would actually be quite a good idea.
One main problem for anti-spam is this: humans are very good at telling spam from legitimate messages. Comupters are nowhere close. Why not? Well, humans are simply better at certain types of problems like pattern recognition because of centuries of evolution. But there are ways around this: genetic algorithms and neural nets are two that I can think of. Both of these are "learning" strategies and need large databases to get started. We're talking about billions of messages or more, not the hundreds that you get everyday.
So the kind of database (one for spam, one for non-spam) that these guys are talking about would be an excellent way to develop intelligent spam-detectors.
Sorry if this is unpopular opinion, but we are against legal and in favor of technolgical solutions for most of the problems of the internet, aren't we? Then why are we waiting for anti-spam legislation to fall like manna from the sky? The best way to fight spam is using technology. Methinks this is a step in the right direction. So get off your ass and contribute. Forward your spam to them. Think of clever algorithms that can make good use of a large database. And code them. And submit patches. Isn't that what open source is for? Hey, may be this is going to be a killer app for open source, considering how big a problem spam is going to be in the next few years
Even I know how to buy a domain name and write a few paragraphs of text on a white background.
But you didn't, did you?
This is a
You're missing the point. The story is not on
What you can do:
SpamArchive.org's efficiency is proportional to the amount, quality, and variety of spam that is provided. End users can forward known spam to submit@spamarchive.org.
The explosion of spam is in a way similar to population explosion -- looks life-threatening at first sight but is actually something that will stabilize over time. Game theory gives an insight to what happens in the long run. Consider a population of peaceful creatures. If there is a mutant creature that is agressive, it will have an advantage over the peaceful creatures, and will multiply. But soon, there will be enough agressive creatures that they will start to fight with and kill each other. Thus the populations of both peaceful creatures and aggressive creatures will stabilize. Such situations are well-studied in game theory; the resulting steady state is known as a Nash equilibrium .
It is early days yet for spam; that is why spammers are so successful and predictions based on extrapolation of spam based on the current growth rate are unnecessarily alarmist. But soon there will be so many spammers that spamming no longer guarantees a profit. The ratio of spam to total mail will stabilize, and spam filtering technology will mature so that the vast majority of spam will never reach the user. Sure, spam will be a minor inconvenience, but no more than that.
For a long time, there were doomsday predictions of the "web as we know it". The pessimists claimed that the signal-to-noise ratio was constantly decreasing and that things would soon degrade to such a point that it would be untenable. Well, what happened? The link structure of the web serves to greatly amplify useful content on the web and filter out noise (so neatly exploited by google).
This is only the latest in a long line of articles saying "spam is increasing at an exponential rate. So in X years Y% of our time will be spent deleting SPAM. E-mail is doomed!!!". This author, for example, says nothing of bayesian spam filters . What is likely is that spam and anti-spam will both mature in a few years, and that a combination of filtering methods will weed out most junk from our mailboxes; users will have so problem manually sending the handful of remaining penis enlargement offers to
Yes, this seems to be one of the major problems for online comics. Here is a tutorial describing how you could reduce bandwidth consumption pngs for comics and several tips for effective use of pngs.
From the article: Used correctly, PNG can drastically reduce the file size and download time of one's comics.
There's also a list of comics using png.
I think that's true for most people using Yahoo's mail service.
I don't know. For me, for instance, it isn't.
It's a bad idea to use a service like yahoo
as one's primary e-mail address. When some
website that wants to spam me asks for an
e-mail during registration, I give my yahoo
address. I also use it for subscribing to
some mailing lists which I read when I'm
bored. I once found yahoo mail it useful
when I was on vacation and my ISP didn't
have a web interface. But not much else. I use
my ISP's e-mail account with my friends
and relatives and my account in university
for most other things. So if yahoo says
no more free access, I'll just say ta-ta.
It doesn't take a finance wiz to figure
out that they could become a pay service
any day. About a year back, I used to put
some stuff bulky up at geocities as backups.
Then they removed ftp access and forced
you to go through their stupid web interface
which had some restrictions on file sizes.
So I looked for other places, but also
learnt my lesson: don't trust any freebie
providers on the web. I made sure I didn't
use my yahoo account for *anything* that I
cared about after that
Don't believe it! Its a big conspiracy... CmdrTaco has been bought. WallsRSolid works for Acer. Those 150 "hardcore linux users" were M$ employees with borrowed penguin T-shirts!!! I _knew_ they'd start something like this the moment Linus left for his cruise... This is MS FUD at its best!! I'd rather believe that RMS is cheering for Bitkeeper. Chant with me: "This is a Conspiracy, this is a conspiracy, this is a conspiracy ..."
Umm.. I'm not sure about this exponential extrapolation thingy. By the same logic, they would be supporting something like 120 architectures by 2006 :-)
Actually, the reason the simputer took so long to take off was that its creators initially focussed on the wrong market - the illiterate masses. No company came forward to mass produce it and only the intervention of the government saved it from dying out altogether. But now that it has gotten off the mark, I think there is a very good market for it out here.
... was this :-)
When big companies get hit a few times like this corporate America will start to see the point that there's really no one who benefits from the patent system the way it is right now. But doing away with patents altogether won't find any takers, as someone's pointed out. Still, this is a good time to start a serious campaign for patent reform. Some checks and balances should be built in, along these lines:
-
Anyone about to release a product submits a description of it to the PTO; patent holders who think the product infringes on their patent has a month or 2 to file a complaint and prove the infringement. The onus of looking out for possible infringement lies enrtirely with the patent holder.
-
A patent holder can not be allowed to sit on a patent indefinitely and prevent others from using the invention. To this end, a patent holder must produce proof that s/he is working to commercially exploit his patent if s/he wants to hold on to it for more than (say) 10 years.
I'm not sure if these are practical to implement the way I've put them, but you get the idea.Of course I don't think anything of this sort will happen in the near future, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight.
In his book "Computer networks", Andy Tanenbaum describes this ingeneous method that the Chinese Govt. could use for DES cracking (by brute force, searching through all 2^56 keys): Every radio and TV set in China comes equipped with a chip that searches through a portion of the keyspace assigned to it; when one of them hits it beams up the answer. Now just imagine! If the dragon used spare cycles for cracking DES, and a billion Chinese used the chips, DES can probably be broken in hours :)
You forgot the most important rule:
When pointing out incorrect grammar, you must write "What you say?!"
It might be true that diagnosis is easy most of the time, but incorrect diagnosis can be far more dangerous than, say, ineffective relationship building. Let me share a personal experience:
When I was a kid, I was afflicted with contraction of the oesophagus. At first I was finding it hard to swallow solid foods. The family doc was a bozo who couldn't diagnose it, said I was perfectly fine and prescribed a placebo. Soon my condition deteriorated to the point when I could not even drink water. On my second visit the doc ordered endoscopy or something of the sort, where I would be made to swallow a tube equipped with some kind of probe so that my interiors would be examined. Fortunately before that horror materialized, I consulted a more experienced physician who had seen a similar case before, and I was cured in a couple of days. If not for the second doctor, my life would have been in serious danger.
Of course, the software cannot replace the doctor. But it can certainly make the "easy things simple and the difficult things possible", as Larry Wall would put it.
I envisage a further possibility: If such a software/database were freely available to the general public, the patient could get questioned by the software at home and email the results toi the clinic before visiting, saving consultation time.
Just a thought.
The example protocol messages that they have given includes a SHA1 integrity check. SHA is the secure hash algorithm, a cryptographic standard. A cryptographic hash is a map h from the set of all bit strings to strings of length k, typically 128. The map h has the additional property that it is intractable to produce two strings (or files, or whatever is being signed) x and y such that h(x) = h(y).
The FSF filters out the firmware binary stuff from the kernel, and releases it as
GNU/Linux
and everybody is happy
Lautier: Are computers a threat for Shogi ?
Habu: In mating problems, called Tsume Shogi, the computer is already superior to the best players. In normal games, however, the computer is still far from the professional level. Its level can be compared to a 4-dan among amateurs [approximately 2300 strength in chess Elo terms. The first dan among professionals starts after the amateur 6-dan. To get a rough idea, the best Shogi players in the world, including Mr Habu, have a ranking of professional 9-dan - JL].
This is one example of the prevailing sad state of affairs of the performance of AI in games. The best chessplaying programs are those which use brute force search and little else. The fact that they can beat world champions tells us little except that the effective branching factor in chess is small. In games like go and shogi where the branching factor is much higher, long-term strategy counts much more, and brute-force is relatively useless, computers are nowhere near the best humans.
Another example: As early as 1962 Samuels wrote a checker playing program which could learn from its previous games and beat reasonably strong humans. After that there has been virtually no progress in game strategy; all the improvement has been in hardware speed. Indeed, it wasn't until 1994 that the first wold-champion-beating checker player, "Chinook" was written. This is an amazingly slow rate of progress compared to other areas of computer science/technology.
Its a shame, considering that game playing is thought to be one of the easiest problem domains for AI.
RMS's claim is that GNU software constitues the major part of the OS and the linux kernel just happens to fit in; hence it should be GNU/Linux. Now, there are 2 ways you can define the OS
a) OS = kernel
==> GNU code = zero
b) OS = kernel + system utilities + windowing system + distribution
Well, in that case we should really be calling it GNU/Linux/X-window/GNOME/KDE/RedHat (or whatever distro).
Forcing people to say GNU/Linux is just twisted logic and ideology.
Yeah, he did *exactly* the same thing at a talk I attended. I guess he always gives the same speech wherever he goes. And he made the audience repeat "The Operating System is called GNU, and Linux is but one of its kernels" or something like that. BTW, I can't imagine how even an ideologist can have the patience to pronounce gnu-slash-linux all the time :-)
Then take a pinguin from south pole and put him into the steppe where the lion was, how many days would you give this poor fellow?
Umm... Isn't that politically incorrect?
By 2008 we should have a well-functioning Earth-Mars network that serves as a nascent backbone of an inter- planetary system of Internets
Anyone else finds it absurd to have a round trip time of almost half an hour?
And imagine the chaos when a site on Mars gets slashdotted by earthlings or vice versa
So, the average family income in India is Rs22,050. That's Rs424/week to live on, so downloading 10 songs will use a quarter of their weekly income. Ouch.
Hmm... If you think the math is so simple, you are sadly unaware of some facts of life in India. The point is that the wealth distribution is ridiculously skewed. For instance, my family is "middle class", and the *monthly* income is about Rs 50000, about 30 times your average. Admittedly a small fraction of the population, but keep in mind that this is a country of a billion people.
The "average" family has never used a computer and probably never will.
Many have pointed out that it is very easy to forge e-mail. Just for reference, here's how you do it:
[~]$ telnet localhost smtp
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.localdomain.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 localhost.localdomain ESMTP Sendmail
8.11.2/8.11.2; Sat, 16 Mar 2002 23:08:12 +0530
mail from: god@heaven.org
250 2.1.0 god@heaven.org... Sender ok
rcpt to: arvindn@localhost.localdomain
250 2.1.5 arvindn@localhost.localdomain...
Recipient ok
data
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
From: god@heaven.org
I've been watching you. Your fly is down.
.
250 2.0.0 g2GHcKT32482 Message accepted for
delivery
quit
221 2.0.0 localhost.localdomain closing
connection
Connection closed by foreign host.
And that's it. Of course, replace localhost.localdomain with the intended recipient's host and domain. The mail from: line is for sendmail to verify the sender's domain and the second From: line will be interpreted by the recipient's MUA.
If I want to factor a large prime or predict the weather, I might have hundreds or maybe thousands of otherwise idle computers available to help with the task.
:-)
Oh my God!! You want to put thousands of computers to factoring a large prime ?
The insight one gains from reading the article is, of course, not that all developers should drop whatever they are doing and rush to develop The OS Which Will Cure All The Ills Of The World. Nor would it be possible for the desktop user to make any money in the manner described: if computing became so cheap, the cost of processing the transfer of money would far exceed the value of the computing time contributed.
The message is that P2P could indeed be the killer app for the desktop that linux is waiting for; world domination is indeed possible if only we are a little more inventive. What OS is best equipped to support massively distributed computing? *nix, of course. Windows users already have a hard time protecting their machines from the internet. What we need is more robust P2P protocols designed with security and scalability in mind.
In the meantime, check out distributed.net