I thought of something similar, though less surreptitious. I run a website that relies on a fairly enormous quantity of scraped data. To keep its dataset curren

I thought of something similar, though less surreptitious. I run a website that relies on a fairly enormous quantity of scraped data. To keep its dataset current I need a huge, continuous scraping cluster. I thought about letting people run a little thing in their system tray so that when the network interface on their computer is idle, it becomes part of my scraping cluster. I would be completely upfront with them about what it is doing - it would serve as a non-monetary way for them to contribute meaningfully to the operation of my site.