“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

- Google CEO Eric Schmidt

“…doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment… It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.

But at any rate they could plug into your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

- George Orwell, 1984

Et tu, Google?

Why is it that the default modus operandi of every Internet company is to blatantly violate your privacy as a first rule of business? Google, surely, is a company that should not need a cheap trick like this in order to promote their product. A company whose “Do no evil.” slogan seems to only apply as far as showing you the most targeted ads and not blatantly deceiving you. Google has embraced Facebook overnight revelation that people don’t want or expect and seems to have launched Buzz as an example of this brave new vision.

Buzz outdoes Facebook when it comes to airing all your dirty laundry to the searchable metaverse. The privacy controls in Buzz are all strictly opt-out. You might miss this fact, as I suspect most people will, unless you are naturally suspicious of any site that has access to too much information about you. And yes, we should all be suspicious of them.

Buzz will show your real name and make it searchable to everyone. It will also show the world who you are following and who is following you. Since it populated your follow list from your email contacts, it essentially reveals your contact list to the world. It also shows your Buzz messages on this publicly searchable profile so if you have something private to say to your friend or spouse, make sure you use Gmail and not Buzz. Of course, they both show up in the same Inbox so mistakes are likely.

What makes Google’s actions more inflammatory than Facebook’s is that your GMail data is used to generate this public content. As an email system, GMail implies privacy and strict control over who your messages go to and who can see them. Therefore, all contacts and data in GMail were added by users with the expectation of full privacy. Buzz will, however, happily tell the world who you’ve been emailing the most. Beware.

There has already been a lot of complaints about this so-called privacy flaws. But can anyone really believe that this was a mistake in the design? That Google didn’t know the implications of making Buzz operate like this? They only need to look at Beacon and other privacy scandals Facebook has gone through to know where this leads.

One would think that launching a product like this that will expose the information of millions of users should take a bit of care and preparation. However, as of this time, Buzz doesn’t even have a Privacy Policy listed on Google’s Policy by Product page!

There is no doubt that Google knew exactly what it was doing when they made Buzz work the way it does. I predict that they will run it for a few weeks as is, making it accumulate users, and then they will “fix the problem” due to user complaints. By this time the damage will be done and this privacy “flaw” will have served its purpose.

Should you decide to turn Buzz off, there is microscopic link at the very bottom of the page that will allow you to do this.

The issue at hand is the amount of power (as in electricity) that your code will consume when running on a large number of users’ computers (since you write awesomely popular software) or over a long period of time (if your software will be in use for years).

Hacks. Free(-as-in-beer)?

Suppose you hacked together a quick Flash widget to go on the front page of your up-and-coming website. Your code is nasty and the widget takes up almost all CPU power on a single core but you have no time to fix it and release it as-is.

Lets run some very basic numbers. A normal user might spend 10 seconds viewing your front page before navigating to another page without the widget. Lets also say that a typical Intel Core 2 CPU will consume about 33W when operating one of its cores at 100% load because of your crappy code. For those 10 seconds on the site, your widget has consumed 33W x 10s / 3600 s/h = 0.092 kW·h.

Let us now assume that you site got mildly popular and received a million visitors over the course of a year, each of which spent only 10 seconds on pages containing the widget. Now your widget has consumed about 92,000 kW·h, or 92 MW·h.

Garbage In – Carbon Out

The average household in the United States uses about 11,000 kW·h (11 MW·h) of electricity, each year. Congratulations! Your inefficient code has used up enough electricity to power almost 8 homes for a full year!

If you live in the United States, half of this electricity is likely to come from coal. Coal has en energy density of about 2.0 kg / kW·h meaning that the amount of coal burned to power your inefficient code is 0.5 * 92,000 kW·h / (2.0 kg / kW·h) = 92,000 kg = 92t. Yes, that is 92 tons of coal!

Given that producing energy from coal also releases CO2 at a rate of about 0.950 kg / (kW·h), your code will have resulted in 87.4 tons of CO2.

These numbers seem quite depressing. What if your widget ends up on the front page of a big site with tens or hundreds of millions of visitors a year? How much environmental destruction can one nested for loop cause? How many dead penguins will you be responsible for? Gasp!

Save The Planet?

But let’s be realistic, code will always consume power and you can only do so much to reduce that. Some applications will have a net benefit of reducing energy consumption by making people more productive and efficient with their time and energy (your punch-the-monkey widget might or might not be one of those).

The point of the matter is that, even when programming, one can consider the environment. If that consideration provides you with the impetus to sit down and properly re-write a power-hungry piece of code then you have made a real physical change in the world. And now, you can put a number on it.

Safe the CPU cycles – save the world.

But botnets might be destined for more than just Spam. As it stands, botnets are some of the largest accumulations of computing power in the world today rivaled only by supercomputers and massive server farms such as those of Google.

Two points that set botnets apart is the organic way in which they grow – by “infecting” computers around them – and how they evolve. The second distinction has to do with the illicit nature of botnets. A botnet needs to be adaptable and resilient. While a server farm or supercomputer are built for a specific purpose with fairly strictly defined inputs, outputs and topology and, for the most part, walled off from the rest of the Internet, a bot net is exposed and usually under constant attack. Law enforcement, security researchers, anti-virus software and even individual owners of the infected machines are all acting against the botnet.

This competition for survival is driving the evolution of botnets ever faster. Today’s botnets are starting to user peer-to-peer decentralized communications for their command and control. They are detecting and punishing any probing of their network.

Emergent Behavior in Botnets

While today’s and tomorrow’s botnets are a far cry from anything resembling machine intelligence that evolutionary step might not be far off down the line. Botnets represent a unique platform on which an emergent intelligence might one day arise. This might take the form of a simple artificial organism attempting to grow and survive on the Internet.

Think of the possibilities of applying the following methods to a botnet of several hundred thousand machines:

Genetic programming – This could be used to spread the characteristics of the most productive nodes (i.e. those that sent out the most spam) throughout the system

Game of Life – This could be used to vary infection patterns to avoid detection

The resultant emergent behavior of a botnet using these methods would be interesting indeed. Another twist to the story comes when two or more such botnets start competing for hosts. This competition would again increase the speed of botnet development to new and, potentially, unexpected ends.

Of course, there will always be a person in the middle of it. Someone will have to write the basic rules of the botnet for propagation, evolution etc. The DNA of the botnet – the implementing the actual exploits – will always be a hands-on task for a human. However, once released, these systems will, more and more, start to take on a life of their own.

Conclusion

While it is unfortunate that botnets are used for illicit purposes today, they hold enourmous potential for researching emergent behaviours. Botnets might be the seeds of future emergent machine intelligence.

Update

Now there is news that a Russian botnet is “fighting” another botnet. Essentially stealing the rival’s data and uninstalling it. The Botcocalypse has begun!