--On Wednesday, 29 August, 2001 23:25 -0700 Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com> wrote:
http://fyi.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/08/29/stealth.computing/index.html http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/29/199205&mode=thread
A group of researchers at Notre Dame figured out how to use the TCP Checksum calculations to get other computers to do number-crunching for them.
"Below, we present an implementation of a parasitic computer using the checksum function. In order for this to occur, one needs to design a special message that coerces a target server into performing the desired computation."
The article has the amount of great mathematical depth you'd expect from CNN :-) But it does say that the paper will be published in "Nature" this week.
for those who didn't see the nature article, the authors have the article (and supplementary material) available at http://www.nd.edu/~parasite/ -paul