kevlar_rat's Journal: benevolent botnets

A thread on comp.misc has drifted into talking about Nicholas Negroponte's vision for "software agents":

Mike Spencer wrote:

Now we have a bimodal distribution of Negroponte's future. If you're a well-funded institution, you can put pages and pages of javascript onto any machine ... The rest of us? I'll just write an "agent" that will find its way into 5000 physicians' computers and report [patient data] back to me. 'Scuse me but I have to see who's trying to break down the door, eh?

There's a difference between using resources on a remote pc and using the data that happens to be stored on it.

Hackers are already using distributed software agents to mine for bitcoins, botnets are running software agents - and where blackhats go now, the whitehats will follow.

On a pc with proper security and privileges there's no reason not to allow arbitrary code to run without risking your data or uptime*. Maybe some day if you have a server you can rent out its resources (cpu, disc space) in slack times in return for using other's resources at peak times. People with thinnish clients will be able to rent from this same pool - even running X-clients in it if needed. Some probes in this direction are screensavers like Models@Home. Buddybackup already does this with disk space - only for backup ATM, but its easy to see how it could be a 'distributed disc drive'.

Replacing the current 'clouds' with benevolent botnets that would be immune from court orders, natural disasters, corporate lock-in etc would be a big win.

* on Windows this is called a 'virus' which tells you something about Windows security.