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

Question

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+.

Edit: I just noticed that they mention their "research on distributed computing" on the page. This is a bit harsh to me : suck up CPU first and opt out later?

Answer 1

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.