If you’re willing to donate bandwidth, I suggest I2P or a public SyncThing node. My server chews through a terabyte of bandwidth helping people securely access their files. I also run Tor’s Snowflake proxy which helps users reach the network.
I2P is Java. SyncThing and Snowflake are written in Go which means you can’t pull off typical memory corruption attacks in these relatively safe languages, and it’s fairly easy to run them in a container.
I don’t feel like it makes a huge difference for me and I run quite a few servers. It’s mainly the cooling costs in the summer months that run up the bill.
BOINC is great. In its day, you could get an enormous amount of computing power on a shoestring budget thanks to volunteers. It also helped the volunteers feel like they were more a part of something, because they were! I used to have a small server farm crunching numbers for science.
Unfortunately, the landscape has changed. Some projects are still around, but many of the big players have left. Computing power is a lot more accessible now, and the main limitation is time spent analyzing the data rather than the computation itself. Cloud computing can make just about any computation happen fast for a reasonable price without having to own all of that hardware. GPUs have exploded in computation capacity. Just, a lot of factors came together where the need isn’t as great.
With that said, I still run it on one mini PC, but the payoff for having to write your application in a distributed fashion doesn’t have the return on investment that it used to.
A seven hour bubble bath in fact, using all the hot water in town.
You don’t want anything that advertises next generation encryption. You want tried and true encryption. You want boring encryption.
Just about half as twice as much.
It’s almost like they want the hinges to break after six months.
In that case it wouldn’t be news.
It's not about the money. It's about hurting people.
The fastest car is a rental car.
I’ll take your shittiest MS Paint meme over your finest AI design.
I want the human element! I’m not relating to a machine. I want something made by another ghost in a meat suit.
It’s a shame that the article appears to have been edited since.