Yes and no. We have created a signed applet capability in the Plura infrastructure, but we have not pushed this out yet. In the future, if an affiliate chooses, he can request work units for a signed applet that would allow them to make http requests. We will probably pay more to affiliates that do this and will certainly require user opt-in. Our normal applet is unsigned and cannot make http requests due to the java sandbox.

We have one company (80legs.com) that is developing a web crawling solution using Plura. We are using a different model to acquire the nodes for this.