User Provided Cloud Computing

Web 2.0 started a paradigm shift concerning content generation. Users spend hours browsing and producing contents to share, most of the times, freely. During these activities, their laptops and home PCs are considerably underused. By combining the amount of idle processing capacity with increasingly fast internet accesses, every computer can be considered as a computational “nearby” resource. The question is: what to do with them? This paper explores how these resources can be used to give something back to the user in a secure and private way.