Home Computers Hijacked For Porn

from the welcome-to-the-distributed-web dept

Last month there were stories everywhere about how spammers were hijacking home computers to send out their spams. Now, some are saying that these hijacked home PCs are doing even more. They're serving up pornographic webpages, without the knowledge of the computers' owners. Of course, I'm a little skeptical about how widespread this really is and how well it actually works. The article quotes Richard M. Smith, who is usually quite reliable, saying he's discovered more than a thousand machines infected this way. The system works in a rotating fashion, so that each machine is apparently only used briefly before moving on to the next hijacked machine. To be honest, my first thought about this was that it's a great way to distribute the bandwidth burden, if people did this legitimately. There have been a few similar projects, but I haven't heard of any that worked all that well. If you could take this sort of application, and find volunteers to agree to download it, high traffic websites could save on their bandwidth bill, and home PC users could use up some of their wasted bandwidth (not that their ISPs would like that). This is what distributed computing was supposed to give us, but hasn't delivered. Once again, it appears, it's the porn world that is leading the adoption of useful technologies (even if it's being used for nefarious purposes).

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