> From: BillK [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > This discussion is a bit out of date. Nowadays no hackers (except for > script kiddies) are interested in wiping hard disks or damaging your > pc. Hackers want to *use* your pc and the data on it. Mostly the > general public don't even notice their pc is working for someone else. > When it slows down sufficiently, they either buy a new pc or take it > to the shop to get several hundred infections cleaned off. But some > infections (like rootkits) need a disk wipe to remove them completely.
This is very true the emphasis is on utilizing victims PCs instead of the old ego thing of crashing systems. Storm botnet could easily go on a decimating attack but it has been very selective especially in the defense of itself. Creation of the botnet was not a trivial undertaking. How many times do we complain on this list about not being able to run AGI because of resource limitations, yet millions of PCs are lying around on the internet idle? The internet is a sitting duck at this moment in time. There are many ways of setting up botnets legal or illegal and they will slowly be discovered and utilized. Personally I think that this situation could be the birthplace of an AGI. Any networked application running on your PC connected to the internet is a potential botnet host node. The design of the AGI needs to "work" with the network topology, resource distribution, and resource availability of the internet host "grid". Typical networked applications running on PCs are extremely narrow function. Yeah there has been a lot of research and code on all of this, there are many open source tools and papers written, etc. but who has really taken the full advantage of the available resources and capabilities? Most of the work has been on the substrate but not on the capability of potential applications. There are a few interesting apps like peer to peer search engines but nothing that I know of that more than scrapes the surface of the capabilities of those millions of networked computers. John ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=70456830-7f022a
