
CPUShare: allows anyone to sell their spare CPU cycles - chaostheory
http://www.cpushare.com/
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evgen
The deeper problem here is that loosely-coupled CPUs have a value
approximating 0. Your unused CPU cycles have absolutely no value to you, so
what you are going to see if a fast race to the bottom in terms of price. This
sounds great, particularly if you need some sort of embarrassingly parallel
task performed, but most of the people providing the CPU cycles will have an
artificially inflated sense of their value (e.g. "I paid X for this system and
if I participate in this scheme for some period of time I should expect to get
X/time back") and are not going to stick around when they learn that in return
for the overhead of the cpushare system and bandwidth costs they will incur
the CPU provider will end up with diddly-squat in return.

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bluelu
I wonder if a virtual machine is being started? How do I make sure no harmful
code is executed on my machine?

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wave
When you think about it, what does your web browser do? It is downloading
someone else's code (Javascript, Flash...) and executing it on your machine.
Somehow your trust the browser. Why not trust the virtual machine? Maybe if
the company only allows Javascript to be executed on the virtual machine,
people might feel more comfortable about the idea.

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tptacek
Yeah, I mean, just look how well that worked out.

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michaelbuckbee
From reading their blog and a little googling, they currently are using
SECCOMP - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seccomp> \- which is a process
restriction mechanism that nobody really seems to trust.

They are working towards using KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) which would be a
Virtual Box running on your local workstation.

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GavinB
The copy on the front page makes it sound like a scam, even if it's not (and I
have no idea either way). It looks like they're trying hard to tell you that
the money is real, which of course makes you wonder if it's really unlikely
that you can earn real money.

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quilby
This site does look suspicious. When you go to the orders page FireFox says:
Secure Connection Failed www.cpushare.com uses an invalid security
certificate.

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tdavis
It's a free cert from cacert.org hence it's not trusted...

The "About" page claims it's a research project which is precisely what it
looks like to me. What's suspicious about that?

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bprater
From the webpage: "Feel free to join CPUShare to immediately start earning
your first CPUCoins and to potentially earn real money by selling your CPU
resources."

Anytime real money is involved or potentially involved, folks should be using
the defacto certification companies that browser all agree on.

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rory096
CACert isn't really unrecognized, it's just that they haven't worked out a
deal with Firefox. There's a 5 year old bug about this, and they're just
waiting for the company to do something before they add them.

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ynd
Is anyone here interested in buying CPU cycles?

I wonder if there's a market of buyers. The idea is cool though.

