Silence on the Wire

Applications, Social Considerations, and Defense

But what now? What is the benefit of having practical parasitic computing and storage schemes, if the benefits are still not nearly good enough to make it a tempting alternative to just getting more hardware?

Despite advances in the practical exploitation of parasitic computing, applications that aim to extend the sheer computing power or storage space of a traditional system may appear pointless when we consider the abundance of cheap memory and gigahertz processors.

The unseen potential of this technology may, however, lie in a wholly different set of applications: volatile computing. The ability to build usable distributed computers that can disperse at will, leaving no physical traces and storing ...