Posted by aj in 
It’s April 1, the day of the supposed massive deathstrike from the Conficker worm. This is extremely unlikely, because it conflicts with the interests of the botnet’s operators.
Compare Ebola to the common cold. Ebola kills its victims within a few days, so outbreaks are rare and contain themselves quickly. The cold, however, is a low level irritation. It’s far more successful in achieving its goal (reproduction.)
If the cold were to suddenly become deadly, it would not only limit its own success by killing its hosts before they could infect others, it would also inspire massive efforts to prevent its spread, further limiting its success.
The purpose of most worms like Conficker is to create a botnet for sending spam. The less impact it has on your machine, the less likely you are to notice it, the less urgently you’ll patch your operating system, the more likely it is to keep sending spam on behalf of its masters.
Zombies or Citizens?
Infected PCs are referred to as zombies. But do you call a person with a cold a zombie? Of course not. Because a cold imposes a much lower tax on its host than zombie-ism does on its victims: a few days of Oprah, rather than staggering, brain-eating and putrefaction.
In fact, a well-run botnet is not only less evil than it seems, it actually isn’t evil at all. It is simply a tax, and therefore amoral. A tax can be either good (levied in a way generally viewed as fair, and used for worthwhile purposes) or bad (levied unfairly and used for unworthy purposes.) But the fact of taxation is no longer even debated. With the exception of a few fringe groups, tax arguments are about the level of taxation and the use of proceeds, not on the legitimacy of taxes in the first place.
The Patriotic Botnet
So, could there be a good botnet? There already are. When millions of people download a screensaver that devotes spare CPU cycles to finding large prime numbers or to folding proteins, they voluntarily participate in a single-task, centrally coordinated network: a botnet.
So it’s a short leap to the following scenario: the US government decides to tax computing, so it distributes a worm that places a claim on 1% of the CPU cycles, disk space and network bandwidth of all US computers connected to the internet. The resulting botnet would be equivalent to a few million CPUs working in parallel – far more powerful than the largest supercomputer. These resources could be used to model nuclear explosions (reducing the need for nuclear testing), simulate global warming scenarios, perform basic research, tabulate population data, crunch tax returns, even test the encryption of a proposed electronic voting machine.
Would people find this acceptable? Not today. But remember that we have reached the point where the government intercepts 40% of your paycheck before you ever even see it, and the response is grumbling acceptance.
The Botnet Business Model
So we’ll reach acceptance of it at some point, and probably though commercial forces. Some entrepreneur will create a general purpose botnet that allows users to voluntarily donate computing resources to the effort of their choosing, and generates profits by re-selling some percentage of the computing resources it allocates. We’ll see this model in the next few years. In fact, it’s virtually indistinguishable from torrent-based filesharing. The government will simply tag along with a required plugin.
See you in the future! It’s a lot closer than you think.
