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Comment by mjs | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, it's a botnet! From the FAQ: "How can the prices be so low?" "Plura pays developers to embed lightweight widgets in their desktop applications or websites. These widgets harness the idle and excess bandwidth and computing power on the computers of people using the applications and websites."

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Plura affiliates actually accept responsibility for getting the permission of their users. Plura encourages disclosure and has found that it is actually very well received by the users once it is explained. It always works our better for Plura affiliates when they disclose. To that end, Plura has actually changed it's TOS with affiliates so that they directly take responsibility for getting user acceptance.

Most Plura apps/websites give users optin/optout capabilities. Rather than anything ill-intentioned, the actual model is really that Plura gives application developers a means of offering their application at a discount (or free) to users that don't mind trading their excess computer resources for the app. For those that don't want Plura+free, the application developer can give them other options (pay, ads, whatever).

Once the users really understand it, they are almost always happy that the developer has a new means of monetization so that the developer will continue to improve the software they are using.

BTW, this all runs in a secure java sandbox where nothing can actually see the users data, disk, what programs are running, or anything else about the computer. Plura has gone to great lengths to try to sanitize the entire process and be good guys.

Interesting way to earn money. However, why a regular user can't run a plura client too so that they can earn cash themsleves?

There's certainly no problem with individual users doing it. Just contact Plura through the web form at http://pluraprocessing.com/contact.php.

Alternatively, you can use one of our affiliates to raise money for charity (not related to our company) http://donatebot.com

I prefer shady botnets being used for stuff like this rather than sending and posting spam, but I'd guess that most of the 50k users who have installed this have no idea that they have and what it does.

I didn't look very hard to find it, but is there a list of places/apps that install this?

I looked at the Plura website, and it seems they mostly target institutions (Schools and such) that want to make money off of their spare cycles. So it's not like they're directly installing stuff on the machines of unwitting fools; they pay for processor time.

EDIT: wow, never mind, I totally misunderstood their model:

http://www.pluraprocessing.com/technology.html

Inspiring.

Reminds me of old ways in doing cloud computing:

EC2 : http://www.nd.edu/~parasite/

S3 : http://isec.pl/papers/juggling_with_packets.txt

; )

Their datacenter costs might be lower. Hopefully, they can pass that on to their customers.

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