> I wonder if this can be used to create a semi-decentralized website where visitors automatically served a vm to run, turning them into an edge server to offload requests from other visitors. The more active visitors, the more edge servers you have. Infinite scaling on the cheap! The visitors may not like you abusing their browser though, but there might be use case where this is acceptable, such as popular community run websites that too expensive to run due to huge amount of traffic.
You can buy ads. Ads cost about as much as ads, so you can buy and sell the same unit, and then run some compute for free.
I ported k(5) to html+js (ecmascript) during Iverson College (I think this was 2014?) and used webtorrent to connect to secondaries to run a scale test. The cpus are cheap, and they are slow, but it was a lot of (distributed) fun. I pitched the idea to KX (and a few others) to sell compute for fractions-of-pennies-per-hour but I think it was still a little early.
Hold on, so you buy an ad slot, serve your code in that ad slot, AND serve another ad inside that slot to resell? Is that actually allowed by ads provider?
The idea of running vm inside an ad to harvest compute from unsuspecting visitors... I think this might accelerate widespread use of adblockers even more if you successfully deploy this in the wild because people will notice ads are getting heavier.
> Hold on, so you buy an ad slot, serve your code in that ad slot, AND serve another ad inside that slot to resell?
Exactly.
> Is that actually allowed by ads provider?
On some ad networks it's prohibited by ToS and (in some cases) a review process, but it is extremely difficult to prevent in practice, especially if you have any understanding of how this works. I estimate perhaps as much as 50-90% of Google's adsense revenue comes from this, so they aren't (directly) incentivized to stop it.
> The idea of running vm inside an ad to harvest compute from unsuspecting visitors... I think this might accelerate widespread use of adblockers even more if you successfully deploy this in the wild because people will notice ads are getting heavier.
Perhaps, but people also have a lot of idle cores, so if you don't block networking and you monitor system performance carefully to ensure you don't affect things, for the most part people simply won't notice.
Quite a few people have been caught out doing wasteful things like trying to generate "coin", which definitely doesn't help, but there's also some interesting applications that have been run on volunteer-cpu-time (folding, seti, etc), so it seems plausible with some charitable examples and some care to avoid impact, this might be a doer?
You can buy ads. Ads cost about as much as ads, so you can buy and sell the same unit, and then run some compute for free.
I ported k(5) to html+js (ecmascript) during Iverson College (I think this was 2014?) and used webtorrent to connect to secondaries to run a scale test. The cpus are cheap, and they are slow, but it was a lot of (distributed) fun. I pitched the idea to KX (and a few others) to sell compute for fractions-of-pennies-per-hour but I think it was still a little early.
Do you think Now's the time?