bugtraq - A comment on using CPU resources, addendum.

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Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2005 20:22:04 +0200
From: Jeroen van Rijn <xananda@...il.com>
To: bugtraq@...urityfocus.com, gandalf@...ital.net
Subject: A comment on using CPU resources, addendum.

Some other thoughts concerning the matter.

Do keep in mind people don't usually spend a lot of time on a particular 
page, so if it's run in the background without people's consent, it's 
unlikely to be very useful.
This may however not stop someone from trying to write some client 
gathering info about the user, their habits, their PC, and sending the 
info back before the page is closed or another link clicked.

> Hi Ken,
>
> There have been java applets that did this with the user's consent, 
> e.g. the MD5crack distributed computing effort had one: 
> http://distributedcomputing.info/recent.html , 
> http://www.engsoc.org/~jlcooke/
> It is not inconceivable one could do something useful with 
> ecma/java/j-script too, however it would have to be some variant of 
> AJAX to be useful to whomever wrote/hosted the script?
> However, I don't think you're likely to see anyone stealing your CPU 
> time with this as of yet.
>
> Maybe someone else has different thoughts on the matter :)
>
> - Jeroen.
>
>> Greetings and Salutations:
>>
>> I had an issue with my Firefox browser.  The browser was static, yet 
>> it was
>> using 70% or 80% of the CPU of the system.
>>
>> It got me to thinking.  Java is a programming language.  What would 
>> prevent
>> companies from running a java script on your computer while you are 
>> viewing
>> their page that uses your CPU to do some computing for them?  Instead of
>> selling (or in addition to selling) advertising the company could 
>> also sell
>> CPU to other companies.
>>
>> Is this feasible?
>>
>> Ken
>