Reuven Cohen has an interesting post on cloud computing and it’s origins in the darknets of eastern europe in the mid-90’s. It makes a certain sort of sense, criminal enterprises face a much harsher environment than most IT organizations with greater need for not just geographical redundancy but jurisdictional diversity so that operations can continue in the face of multiple attacks. I have occasionally thought that fast flux hosting as practiced by various botnets might be a useful source of techniques for solving certain forms of scaling problems. Of course legitimate uses are hampered by the need to ask permission, and to not divert resources from their rightful owner; but scenarios where users are asked to ‘help out’ their favorite sites by hosting caching proxies or edge-of-cloud application-servers.
Thanks to James Urqhart for the link.
