The street finds its own uses for distributed computing, it seems:
those generous souls who fill our mailboxes with penis enlargement/debt elimination advertisements have decided to help out struggling students; specifically, spammers are
paying students to install spam relay software on computers in their dormitories. The software works not unlike Seti@Home and such, only rather than solving computational problems, it relays unsolicited advertisements, hiding its origins. All this is hardly surprising; with their tight finances and access to free broadband, students would make a tempting target for such opportunists. And, of course, those students gullible enough to fall for it end up losing their network connections.
(via TechDirt)