my thoughts on benevolent botnets

pete lindstrom recently penned a post on the idea of benevolent botnet... it's not the first time i've seen this topic come, up - martin mckeay posted about a related idea of battling botnets with botnets (presumably one side of that fight would be benevolent botnets)...

my thoughts run something like this - implicit in the idea of the botnet is that the computers that make up the botnet are being remotely controlled without authorization from their owners and therefore no botnet can be considered benevolent...

if the collection of connected computers are being controlled without authorization then you're stealing cycles at the very least, as well as a certain amount of bandwidth in order to communicate with the command and control server...

if the computers are being controlled WITH authorization from their owners then you have a distributed computing project, not unlike seti@home or distributed.net - and you can't really call either of those botnets...

so much like the very act of self-replication makes supposedly good viruses bad, the very act of unauthorized remote control makes supposedly benevolent botnets malicious...