Juno P2P supercomputer plan condemned

Fred Langa at Byte.com has written an editorial that exposes the fine print in the Juno Online Services Inc.'s new Terms Of Service agreement with its 14 million subscribers. Juno will sell its subscribers' unused storage and computational power in a grand peer-to-peer distributed virtual supercomputer strategy. Clients with big computing tasks will pay Juno to solve them by distributing pieces of the problem to its many users. The actual controversy has arisen from the fact that Juno has, in writing at least, put any and all responsibility for their P2P experiments on its subscribers.

Part of that agreement reads, "You agree that, as between you and Juno, you shall be responsible for any costs or expenses resulting from the continuous operation of your computer, including without limitation any associated charges for electricity, and that you shall have sole responsibility for any maintenance or technical issues that might result from such continuous operation."

Read the entire story at Byte.com.