[jazzyjackson]

Hurting anyone, no, but the whole jukebox probably cost the provider at least a penny all told, and that's a good enough reason for someone to close the oversight.

EDIT: thinking about it again, there is such a thing as surplus capacity. Like how before we all transitioned to pay-as-you-go elastic cloud services you would just have an idling CPU you could point at SETI and folding@home.

The jukebox probably didn't strain the host enough that they had to expend any actual expense, so I changed my mind, somebody might have thought they were shutting down some freeloaders but they weren't costing any money really.

OTOH there are cases where viral phone forwarding blew past the system's capacity and did cause downtime, see "You and the little mermaid can both go fuck yourselves, I can't find The Books, they must be in La Jolla" [0] (Act One)

[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/203/transcript

[0.1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROLM

[technothrasher]

To be fair, while our jukebox couldn't really cause an issue, that wasn't where we stopped. We also figured out a test code that opened a long distance line on any phone. Since we had to pay for long distance calls back then, that was likely much more damaging to the school when we spread that around.

[jrockway]

I think idle CPUs still exist, people are just afraid to share them now. For example, for lowest latency you want your application servers close to your end users. Your end users probably all go to bed at about the same time and wake up at the same time. So your server is just sitting there taking up space, maybe saving a little power, overnight. But, nobody is will to take the risk to let someone else use their computer for a batch job of some sort, so the best you get is slightly less heat output and slightly less power consumption instead. For those that don't really care, the cloud providers have shared core instances, so some batch job is probably using your cycles late at night.

I think the thing that killed SETI@home was crypto mining. Why help others when you can collect stuff for yourself? Plus, everyone woke up to the electricity arbitrage going on; when every employee started using their work computer to mine crypto, and the electricity bills got high, someone started looking for answers. The edict came down from on high: don't steal our electricity for yourself or for human good. Rest in peace, SETI@home and folding@home. (I was always personally a fan of Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search when those things were cool. I guess I didn't know much about protein folding or searching for extraterrestrial life, but I did understand factoring numbers.)

[jazzyjackson]

I agree that crypto killed donating cpu cycles, it was only surplus insomuchas it couldn't be converted to coins