Mike Linksvayer writes:
> Ever since reading Vernor Vinge's "True Names" I've thought a distributed
> artificial intelligence would be one of the neatest things one could do
> with distributed computing (the "Mailman" from the aforementioned story
> was a distributed AI that got its name because it answered questions
> slowly, as if by post).
Selling spare cycles and bandwidth may be nice, but how do you conquer the system perversion problem, particularly if your code mutates? (Those of you who participated in rc5/bovine may have noticed that some of the clients had hidden 'features', now if you can execute arbitrary code directly or via buffer overruns... ouch) This is a problem even with ppp dialup, with xDSL/crosslinked local networking the global system is at a catastrophic threshold.
I'd estimate we'd be damn lucky if we can evade a global worm during the next few years. You don't even need a GP engine, a small handcrafted exploit library (notice that even switch firmware like IOS is vulnerable) is totally sufficient. If the code can search for constructive buffer overruns on its own, god help us. After the wintel boxen are taken over and used for subversion platforms, the rest of the systems can't be far behind. In any case will networks be unusable, since saturated with perversion packets.
'gene