Earlier today I talked my sys-admin into letting me install the software to
help factor RSA-129 on my workstation. When I mentioned how easily it
installed he suggested I run it on a number of other workstations -- after all
I had login permissions for them all.
An hour later a coworker was giving me a stern lecture about how I shouldn't
run a process on his system in background without getting his full permission
first (not only to run it and to be assured that it would not consume
resources, but also that it satisfied *his* requirements for legitimacy). The
fact that the process was nice'd and previously approved by the sys-admin was
considered irrelevant.
I've since talked to several other coworkers; about 1/3 feel the same as the
coworker mentioned above, the other 2/3 feel that if the system resources are
available they can be used by anyone as long as they don't impact the primary
user. *Everyone* appears to believe that their view is obvious, although most
admit that other views are not totally unreasonable.
This specific application is trivial, but what does this portend for the
future? It's not hard to identify legitimate background tasks which could be
run by businesses overnight, but will efforts to use idle resources run into
hostility by workers who feel that ``their'' workstation or PC is being
grabbed by others who don't respect their privacy or ownership? Would such
distributed software be acceptable at night, or by users without any
indication of system load (be it ``perf meters'' or flashing disk lights), but
not by users who could notice such indications of active processing?
Distributed processing over LANs seems promising, but have users had
individual PCs and workstations which acted alone too long for them to accept
the idea of a supra-system computer?
Bear Giles bear@cs.colorado.edu/fsl.noaa.gov [Bear Giles via risks-digest Volume 15, Issue 29]
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