What if the same principle at work in botnets could be put to use for good?
Let's say you're sitting at home surfing the Internet, checking out the latest posts on Internet Evolution, maybe browsing through your email. And for one reason or another -- maybe a run to the grocery store, or a walk around the park, or work -- you realize that you need to pry yourself away from the soft glow of your monitor.
Why not put all those wasted hours of processing power to good use? Volunteer your computer to a good cause. You could let researchers send numbers for your otherwise idle computer to crunch.
It's called volunteer computing, and it's a type of grid computing that allows volunteers to offer their computers to help process data for research projects. The idea is to give researchers the opportunity to access processing power at a low cost.
And there's plenty of processing power out there: Over 80 percent of all Americans have a computer, with almost 90 percent hooked to the Web, according to a 2008 survey by the Nielsen Company.
Individuals use secure connections like the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) to lend their idle computing power to projects like Oxford University's Climatepredition.net, which is currently using over 57,000 host computers to predict the Earth's climate as far as the year 2080.
There are hundreds of different computer projects that run BOINC, such as University of Delaware's Docking@Home, which creates model simulations to test the effects of new drugs before using them in laboratory testing.
Another BOINC-linked Website to check out is GridRepublic, where "members run a screensaver that allows their computer to work on public-interest research projects when the machines are not otherwise in use." GridRepublic members can lend their computers to research projects like POEM@home, which studies protein structures, or Quantum Monte Carlo, which investigates equations of quantum theory.
Unfortunately, computers are already involuntarily used to commit cybercrime. Botnets, or a collection of hacked computers, are put to use to gather credit card information, banking account numbers, Social Security numbers, and other personal data, and to transport malware. A recent example was the Spanish Mariposa, where three men used a virus to infect almost 15 million personal, corporate, government, and university computers in more than 190 countries. Jart Armin recently wrote about the Waledac botnet that controlled 30,000 to 90,000 computers and could send 1.5 billion spam emails a day.
The power behind a botnet rests in the number of computers they infest. Then the virus uses the processing power of the host computer, giving the "bot master" control and extra power to crash Websites, spam emails, and possibly hack into security.
If criminals can use a little bit of computer power for evil, why can't the good guys use it to their ends?
Similar to Mariposa, BOINC uses a network of multiple computers to complete a task. Though it's not downloading malware or spamming email inboxes, but instead crunching data to help research.
A few other volunteer computing projects include the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, for finding prime numbers; the eOn Project, which calculates the movements of atoms; and GStock, which tracks stock market data to offer buy and sell projections. For a list of different volunteer projects, check out Volunteer@Home.
Obviously, the difference between Mariposa and BOINC is that the latter is a voluntary system, where people allow their computers to be networked. While the Internet poses many malware risks, the way it it brings people together certainly outweighs the cons. Volunteer computing is one more way the Internet opens up new possibilities.
— Matthew Mikus is a journalist specializing in technology, business, and environmental issues.
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