Hackers Spawn Web Supercomputer On Way To Chess World Record 130
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."
Bitcoin mining in Javascript. (Score:5, Informative)
... only need to get ten trillion users for three days to get 0.001 BTC.
I can already hear the hoards of criminals running to do this.
My understanding was this wouldn't work well (Score:5, Informative)
My understanding was this wouldn't work well for BitCoin, because the raw computing power people are throwing at it with GPUs and ASICs easily dwarfs even significant numbers of zombies, and even WebGL can't help you (too limited an instruction set).
Of course by this point the matter is hearsay... but still, Bitcoin is a tough nut to crack these days.