CrowdProcess: HTML5 supercomputer

crowdprocess.com

8 points·jmngomes··6 comments

It is in my opinion no way OK to abuse your users resources like this. They trust you to perform only the task that your website claims to do, and not a whole lot of different stuff.

This is exactly like people deploying bitcoin miners in their products (i.e. the esea.net scandal).

Additionally there is already an array of different distributed computer networks one can join with a private computer, why not improve on this type of solutions, rather than forcing it down the users throat in a very immoral way?

> This is exactly like people deploying bitcoin miners in their products.

Yes, but I think these guys would make more money straightforwardly using other people's electricity to mine bitcoins. Using it to create some wonky "cloud supercomputer" is comparatively wasteful.

I do not like resource intensive stuff either.

But people in general do not seem to mind having resource intensive stuff running, like videos (auto-starting) and Flash (on the way out, but not because users do not like it - they have no idea).

And to me this morally better then the privacy intruding ad stuff that is used now to make money for website owners.

A nice message would be good though. Like 'While you are visiting this page we use some of your processor to so some complex calculations to make this a better world'. Because from my understanding this is mainly used for academic stuff.

In your opinion, could the moral problem be solved by websites displaying an alert, similarly to the alerts for cookies policy mandated by the EU?

hopefully the javascript gets added to adblockers at the least.

Running risk-management models on rando client-side boxes seems like an amazing way to test your algorithm's ability to tolerate Byzantine failures.

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