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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

What if someone did that, but to use the routers for some charitable distributed computing project?

Or mining crypto currencies and giving the proceeds to the router's owners?

Or perhaps a globally distributed weather prediction system that automatically detects network enabled weather stations and predicts weather everywhere for free?

Or a distributed P2P social network?

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Well, the increased power consumption of the hardware not entering sleep mode would be a non-marginal amount of power theft.

Not to mention consent...

It's wrong, full stop. No less wrong than it would be for someone to set up a homeless encampment on property you own without your consent.

Sure, it's (probably) a good cause. It's still wrong.

It's morally wrong.

You don't suddenly have the right to use someone else's personal belongings as you see fit just because they left a door or window unlocked.

What if the router was being unused? What if the power usage was minimal? I think it is unethical not to utilize resources that are being wasted.

I hope your parents taught you to ask before invading somebody's personal property.

Are you okay with XYZ Tech Company snooping on your private messages, emails, or credit card transactions? The impact that you'd see would be minimal (aside from more targeted ads, perhaps), and it's data which would otherwise be "wasted" if nobody was mining it.

I hope your parents taught you that too, thanks. Anyways, no its not okay for XYZ because they are invading the privacy of people's lives as a means to make more money. In the other circumstance, you would be using unused resources, not invading privacy, and contributing to projects such as Folding@home, which hopes to solve hard protein folding problems in order to better humanity.

This appeal to morality is useless. ok its wrong to you but doesn't mean it wrong to me.

I like the outside the box thinking for positive, however the environmental impact of crypto makes the latter seem like a net negative, given the compute efficiency :/

Sure, but if the increase in power usage is marginal enough, maybe it'd be worth it for the router owner and be useful for the community at large.

Even if it's a crime to do it without permission ;-)

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