The Zeitgeist

I’ve not been paying much attention to this whole Storm BotNet / virus thing b/c I am on a Mac, and, as everyone knows, us snotty holier-than-thou Mac users don’t really have to worry much about the crud that infects the Windows universe… however when a virus threatens to become (or may already be) the worlds largest and most powerful distributed supercomputer cluster… it may be time to head for the hills.

This is really pretty amazing (yes, yes, viruses and malware are bad, baaaad; and the people who create them are criminal dopes, but this is quite a feat if true). I suppose since it’s a remotely controlled botnet, someone or some group can actually tell it what to do, so I am dying to know:

• What’s the programming model? Simple scripts? MPI? PVM?
• Is work distributed? How?

As the Gawker and Über Review posters point out.. this could be amazing boon to efforts like SET@Home or other distributed research projects … it of course does raise all sorts of fun AI/SciFi thought-experiments… could such a massive compute engine become sentient with the right programming?  Hmmm… Didn’t Vernor Vinge write about this very thing in True Names…?