Apologies in advance for any breach of etiquette....

Is it possible to run a Java applet (with applet-style security) within the LimeWire environment?

If you could, I could think of a business model that would allow commercial sponsors to "rent" unused CPU time on the network to fund future development.

<edited>

Okay, overreaction. Read past this.

Don't you think you're overreacting? Distributed computing isn't dangerous for you at all. It usually doesn't consume cpu time when you need it and it also doesn't harm your privacy. All you'd do is lend your cpu to do a couple of harmless calculations from time to time, when you wouldn't even notice it.

If you think the grid computing part about kazaa was dangerous you have absolutely no clue, since it's not. The only real problem about Brilliant Digital's Altnet is its auto-update. For who's going to make sure some hacker doesn't use it to infect you with a virus? Auto-updates in a p2p network are insecure by definition.

"allow commercial sponsors to "rent" unused CPU time on the network "

I don't want a commercial entity using my cpu cycles is the point. I'll use limeshop (I dont have a problem using them as a referrer.. there's no real harm there.. at least someone will benefit from purchaces, if I cant.).

If I want to find aliens, I'll install SETI.

If I want to cure cancer, I'll install Folding Chairs, or whatever it is.

What if I already donate idle cycles to cancer? And some business wants to pay you to simulate nuclear explosions or something? I sure as hell want the cancer cure to be found first.

Possibly have seperate compilations. LimeWire, and LimeWire Lite. At minimum, an opt-in screen during the install, with an explanation of what it does.

Maybe I was overreacting a bit. But my point still stands. (Banner ads I can stand, but if lime gets any crazy features like a distributed cycle stealing network, Im switching to Gnucleus... at least they have GnuCache and Hashes :P

I definitely agree with the opt-in stuff, I think I have ways of compensating people so that they would want to opt-in. But my question still stands: is it possible?

I'll check out KaZaA, but there are things about LimeWire (mainly the all-Java implementation, especially if it supports applet-style security) that would make it a great platform.

LimeWire is about as secure as any other program, since it's not an applet. You couldn't write a gnutella client as an applet, since applets can't write to / read from local files (at least the shouldn't be able to do so).