Folding@Home Distributed Computing: Another public resource distributed computing grid, with 500,000 registered hosts.  This compares to 4m for SETI (see CACM paper) and aboug 40,000 for climateprediction.net.  Google's compute function profides many subscribers to the Folding network.  Nice maps of users available.  A paper paper measuring Folding@Home's performance impact on PCs shows negligible impact (for most apps under 1%).  Security was designed in, incluing "extensive measures to check all of the data entering your computer and the results we send back to Stanford with 2048 bit digital signatures. If the signatures don't match (on either the input out the output) the client will throw away the data and start again. This ensures, using the best software security measures developed to date (digital signatures and PKI in version 3.0), that we are keeping the tightest possible security."  Result is that the engine is more secure than a browser or other general purpose networked app.

11:23:58 PM