24-10-2009, 02:11 PM
[attachment=202]
[attachment=203]
The Net is a fertile place and where new ideas/products surface quite often. We have already come across many innovative ideas such as Peer-to-Peer file sharing, distributed computing and the like. Parasitic computing, which harnesses the computing power of machines that spread across the Net to accomplish complex computing tasks, is new in this category. The successor to distributed computing has opened up a whole new can of worms. It works by exploiting a weakness in the TCP/IP system's error checking system. The problem is that forcing target machines into performing calculations puts a greater load on them than a regular packet would, and the server owner has not agreed to take part - in effect the technique is stealing processing power, but without breaking any laws. Although the technique is too slow to have much practical value at present, it does raise questions for the future
