Electric Sheep

Back to evolving software and artificial life, this time it's electric sheep.  According to Wikipedia,

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver.

Note that electric sheep is a distributed computing project.  Other distributed projects include SETI@home, which searches for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence; Bitcoin, the most widely used alternative currency; and ClimatePrediction, a project to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate modelling. In other words your computer becomes a member of a network for the purpose of extending the project's computational ability and/or information processing.

According to an article by Ryan Naraine in eWeek, Grid Computing Can Allow Security Threats, (2005).  (Sorry, it's a fairly old article, but the only one I could find that isn't a scientific paper and locked up tighter than ...)

Wait a minute.  The terminology has evolved: what we're looking at is cloud computing. And "cloud security"

is an evolving sub-domain of computer security, network security, and, more broadly, information security. --Wikipedia

Back to electric sheep.  There are many samples of what the screensavers look like at the electric sheep site and information about how to take part in the project.  Terms for using the application's output are on the remix and reuse page.  Here's a video showing electric sheep on an Ubuntu desktop, published at PinoyGeekdotOrg:

A note to the wise: don't install this application at work without checking with your network admin first.

-- Marge