On Mon, 12 Jan 2015 12:04:45 +1300, Peter Reutemann wrote:
"There is a new idea out there, proposed by Shawn Wilkinson, Tome Boshevski & Josh Brandof, that if you have unused disk space on your HD that you should rent it out."
-- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/01/11/181208
The first thing that occurred to me, and I expect to others as well, was what about Internet bandwidth usage? Speaking as an Internet user in NZ, that would be the most likely thing to incur costs for me, not the hard drive usage per se. In terms of drive usage, I have one or two drives that exhibited bad sectors in the past, which disappeared when I wiped them (I wasn’t going to return them with my data on them); only it turns out the hard-drive vendors won’t take a drive back if it doesn’t actually report any bad sectors. So they remain in my “dodgy” pile. So I see no harm in exposing others to the risk of using them. :) In terms of legalities, IANAL, but this sounds similar to the situation of running a Tor node. Not that I know anything about the legal liabilities of running a Tor node...