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neohapsis "distcrack" applet : what does it do? Suspicious!

neohapsis "distcrack" applet : what does it do? Suspicious!

I went to this page on neohapsis about the latest Linux kernel bug. I kept this URL opened in a tab and I noticed that my CPU was at full load... Weird. Then after looking around for a while I notice "Applet DistCrack.class started", WTF? I promptly banned it with AdBlock+.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 160
Total answers/comments: 1
Guest [Entry]

"I tried the link and reached the page with firefox.

Noticed nothing suspicious active on my system
Opened NoScript for neohapsis.com; temporarily

Still no new activity...

Then, opened the ""blockable items"" list on AdBlock+

I could see the blocked item
http://dc.suntzu.net/DistCrack.class

Since I had opened NoScript specifically for the primary site (neohapsis),
I effectively opted out.
Would not even have noticed all this
if I had been to that site without reference from this question

Short story: If you are fine to run Ads from other Ad servers,
You probably do not mind giving some CPU time to distributed computing research :-)
(this is probably their philosophy too)

If you want to opt-out of such things,
take suggestions from my description above."