Swapping Clock Cycles for Free Music?

droopus writes "USA Today is reporting on an innovative business model for the music business. Free music for your spare CPU cycles. Honest Thief says the firm has developed software, to be available in the second quarter of this year, that will enable file-sharing providers to capitalize on the unused CPU cycles of their members. That in turn would allow them to raise money to compensate artists for the use of their material. Honest Thief said the software, known as ThankYou 2.0, enables a peer-to-peer file-sharing client to turn the computers of digital music fans into nodes in a distributed net. By leasing out the processor power on distributed nets to research facilities the firm could generate revenues that would be distributed back to the musicians. Some very smart people have suggested this before, but this seems like the first real implementation. "

Correct URL for honest thief..

[quikgrit]

No, it wasn't /.ed after 4 posts...

http://www.thehonestthief.com/ is the correct URL.

Re:Already done...?

[unborracho]

Kazaa really f'd its users over with its adware, and that other thing as was mentioned in that slashdot article.

this is the exact reason that i use kazaa lite [kazaalite.com] (caution, popups)

This could work...

[gunne]

...but I don't think so. The RIAA & co. wouldn't be interested, beacuse they would not understad the concept. Believe me, they _never_ understand the concepts of new innovations.
Since they will not understand it, they will boycott it and try to ban it.

Geeks wouldn't want to install something that surely will be delivered with a 1096-page EULA stating that Honest Thief can do whatever they please with your CPU, whenever they please, and that they may close your account when they feel like it.

And Joe Sixpack couldn't use it either, because his ISP would ban this bandwith hog.

That's just the way it is, and I am _not_ pessimistic.

Re:But .....?

[Limburgher]

Yes, it is. Folding@Home, and possibly SETI, I can't remember, check for a connection before transmitting a packet of crunched numbers. I think Folding will even dial, transmit, downoad and disconnect, if you want it to, IRRC. Been awhile since that machine died though, so I could be mistaken.

Re:Correct URL for honest thief..

[Nfnitloop]

At least link it [thehonestthief.com]

Simpson's Did It!

[_bug_]

See here [com.com]. The evildoers were Brilliant Digital Entertainment [brilliantdigital.com].

This time around its Honest Theif [honestthief.com].

When will the naming of companies with oxymorons end?!

Yes, it is.

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

"Is it really possible to do "distributed computing" using computers that are constantly being turned on and off at irregular and unpredictable intervals?"

Yes, if your system is designed right. Remember, seti@home doesn't require extensive communication to work, it handles 250K packets which are handled over several hours or a day, and then returned, and new information is gathered. This keeps the master servers from being hammered to death. Also, they're redundantly assigned, to make sure of data integrity, and if a client never returns a result, another one with the same packet probably will. It's no good for small jobs, but big jobs, like weather modelling, key cracking, analyzing RF signals, etc, should be fine.

Re:But .....?

[Songblade001]

Well, it would be feasible for any computationally intensive tasks like folding [stanford.edu], where it takes a long time to work on a single, relatively small work unit. A few minutes to download a work unit, a few hours to process it and voila! Of course, finding a suitable project that you can make money at would be hard.

eMule Project

[tomzyk]

I've only glanced at the first 20 or so replies to this article and already about a third of them are talking about KaZaA.

If you don't like KaZaA's constant pop-up windows and warning messages and prompts to install the latest Flash plug-in etc... use something else!

I just discovered the eMule Project [emule-project.net] about a week ago. Open source. No ads. And it looks a lot nicer than the spamware that I've been using for the past year or so too. Yes, it took me a while to get used to it (I had to actually READ THE HELP FILES to figure out how to get it past my router!) but it works really well now.

Strange businessman/plan

[MS_is_the_best]

The man behind this corporation doesn't have a very good name in the Netherlands. (Pieter Plass). He has already been trying to hype his 'honest thief' service on various occasions (the last years). Without releasing one single byte. [plass.nl]

He has also shown in the past that he had no real knowledge about P2P, he just follows the buzzwords. Just look the silly honest thief site...

Just some weirdo who desperately wants to become rich and who thinks he is very cool. I think this service will utterly fail.. (unless perhaps he convinced some skillfull developers with his peptalks, but I hope they are smarter...).

Re:Concerns...

[override11]

Compensation = .... Umm, you get to use their P2P network and download MP3's...

I didnt even have to read the article to tell you this, just read the dang summary, sheesh...

Re:Clock cycles = Electric Bill

[stratjakt]

Damn you pay a lot for electricity.

I have 5 PC's on all the time (though not at 100% utilization). Even at 100% they wouldnt suck more than about 100 watts each.

I also have a bearded dragon, whos home has two 150 watt basking lamps, and 60 watts of flourescent lighting. I'm also not a fanatic about turning off the lights when I leave the room. I'm notorious for leaving the bathroom light on all day (60 watts times 4 bulbs)

My bill is only around 100 a month.

Re:Strange businessman/plan

[MS_is_the_best]

The man behind this corporation doesn't have a very good name in the Netherlands. (Pieter Plass [plass.nl]). He has already been trying to hype his 'honest thief' service on various occasions (the last years). Without releasing one single byte.

He has also shown in the past that he had no real knowledge about P2P, he just follows the buzzwords. Just look the silly honest thief site...

Just some weirdo who desperately wants to become rich and who thinks he is very cool. I think this service will utterly fail.. (unless perhaps he convinced some skillfull developers with his peptalks, but I hope they are smarter...).

These spare CPU cycles aren't worth that much.

[Richard Mills]

There are some fundamental problems with this proposed business model, but I won't get into those. My problem with this is that spare CPU cycles that they intend to use simply aren't worth very much because of the slow and unreliable nature of the network connectivity that most users will have. While SETI@home and distributed.net work on "embarassingly parallel" problems that require very little communication, many, many problems that people are interesting in paying money to solve require regular communication between nodes and thus some guarantee on the quality of network service. Some amount X of spare CPU cycles on machines using 56K modem connections (or even cable or DSL modems) just isn't worth nearly as much as an equivalent amount of spare CPU cyles on machines connected by something like gigabit ethernet... or even switched fast ethernet.

Kazaalite?

[Lispy]

This is the exact reason why I use OpenFT [sourceforge.net].

Re:Not viable

[infolib]

If your average person downloads an album a month (a SEVERELY conservative estimate) that is a $15-20 album that isn't sold.

That's as far as revenue goes. Profit is not nearly that much. (I'd guess the retailer alone takes ~40%) With these costs shaved off, people will probably buy more music, perhaps generating more profit from less revenue. CPU cycles may still be too cheap, but you haven't proven it.

What's worse, you're propagating that dead "every-file-downloaded-is-a-CD-sale-lost" argument. While there may be a (documented?) correlation, it's much more subtle. Besides, its so Hillary Rosen.

Re:Already done...?

[Mitchell Mebane]

kazaalite.com is a evil villain pretending to be the real KaZaA Lite site. Why evil? They act like they are the real site, and give no credit to the real people behind it. They also run anti-ad-blocker.

For reference, the real site is here [k-lite.tk]. KaZaA Lite 2.1.0 is an excellent client. Now if only they had error checking/correction...

Re:Like paying airline mechanics with free car was

[quintessent]

The biotech industry has cash to spare and needs lots of cycles. This should be a major source of funding.

Of course, I prefer to donate cycles for research that will be public domain.

There's just one way for this to be profitable

[jetmarc]

I don't think that HonestThief can function, because

1. RIAA won't let him distribute music electronically without restrictions (DRM) no matter how much he pays them per song. RIAA views at every unlocked MP3 as source of hundreds, if not thousands of pirate copies.

2. CPU cycles are difficult to sell, especially when they are not reliable (client might just disappear for a month) and not trustworthy (client might sabotage the project by producing false computation results).

I see a possible way for it to function, but it would be a complete rip-off. Note that this not related to reality at all - it's pure imagination. I possess no knowledge about HonestThief (I've not even read the article, just the Slashdot comments!).

A. don't intend to pay the music producers at all, just prepare to disappear within a months (or go bankrupt)

B. don't intend to sell the CPU cycles. Instead, consume them yourself. The best (but most illegal!) purpose would be to crack some cryptographic secret that can be turned into money later. You know, bank network security etc - let your imagination play..

I'm not suggesting that HonestThief is planning any such thing.. It's just that I can't figure out how his business model can work.

Marc