yeah, but think of the pro: "you can help pay for this website by pressing this button and leaving this window open for an hour". You could help SETI by just visiting a URL.
By fertile pasture I mean that both malevolent and benevolent communities will support this. This could see a lot of optimization if open sourced (is it?).
If it's voluntary on the user's part, then I'd be all for it. I was more concerned about the "in the background without attracting attention" part, which implies that it is done behind the user's back. I could see users opting into distributed computing tasks if given the choice.
By fertile pasture I mean that both malevolent and benevolent communities will support this. This could see a lot of optimization if open sourced (is it?).