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Motherboard writes about dodgy, javascript-using web sites which are throwing a little extra CPU load onto visitors and hoping they won't notice much.
Netlab 360's analysis suggests that in-browser cryptocurrency mining, which stormed back onto the world stage in 2017 after being dormant for several years (likely due to low cryptocurrency prices) via a torrent site is now chiefly the purview of porn sites. It's worth noting, too, that criminals have found some pretty creative ways to get people to mine cryptocurrency for them outside of website visits, including hacking an Argentine internet provider.
In-browser cryptocurrency mining has the potential to eat up your computer's resources and slow down your machine, making the trend of particular interest to cyber security researchers lately. Last year, Symantec predicted that in-browser mining would turn into an "arms race" in 2018 as malicious actors come up with even more inventive (and invasive) methods of mining digital coins with someone else's machine.
Source : Porn Sites Are Doing the Most Cryptocurrency Mining
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday February 09 2018, @11:41PM (12 children)
If you're looking at porn, you're probably not doing much serious stuff on you machine at the same time...
So, between mining a few coins and having ugly disruptive flashing ads, what's the better solution to get that content provider a few pennies for that bandwidth?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @11:43PM (2 children)
Here we see the slippery slope sliding headlong into hell.
(Score: 5, Touché) by bob_super on Saturday February 10 2018, @01:14AM (1 child)
Head first, maybe. And "hell" is not what she calls it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:25AM
Glad you've never found yourself off the heavenly path ;)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by requerdanos on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:17AM (7 children)
Trick question?
Seriously, if there was a sign-up page with a button "Click here to run our mining process while on our page instead of ever seeing the blinking annoying ads again" it would very likely be an opt-in of epic proportions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:40AM (3 children)
> an opt-in of epic proportions
Feels like a tragedy of the commons scenario, though. If a million browsers each spent one penny worth of electricity so that the hosting site could mine $10 worth of coin (remember, javascript on a general-purpose CPU has *terrible* hashrate/efficiency), that's a net loss of $9990 that just gets pissed away as a side effect...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:58AM
that's $9990 that
just gets pissed awayis indirectly spent supporting content producers as a side effect while encouraging them to remove annoying ads.(Score: 4, Interesting) by acid andy on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:53AM
I suppose it depends whether it's during the winter. When your house is cold, suddenly previously inefficient uses of electricity become useful. Granted that it would be better off spending those cycles calculating something more useful for the planet though. Has anyone ever tried to make a cryptocurrency out of useful calculations like protein folding or SETI? I can see that it might be undesirable if you're effectively monetizing information that should be freely available scientific knowledge, a bit like patenting a genome.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Saturday February 10 2018, @10:51AM
I'd see that as an opportunity actually.
Imagine if pornhub started to do this instead of ads, now imagine if they also would sign agreements with the power-companies to curtail their mining when requested, it would be one very fast and very well distributed load-shedding. And if the geo-ip or similar is accurate enough they probably also could help reduce the risk of overload on specific parts of the grid during peaks.
It probably would be cheaper than having to run coal/gas/oil plants at partial burn all the time so they can ramp up to cover for intermittent sources (and for nuclear it would also be great since it means they always could go full power)
(I'm actually amazed that no nuclear operator hasn't set up a cryptocurrency miner on their premises (so it never hits the grid), and just run that at full blast when the price they get for electricity drops down below what they would get for the mining - or at least during negative prices [or when prices are below what it would cost to produce that kWh]).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tftp on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:13AM
Probably mining cakes less resources of your computer than the flashy javascript ads.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Saturday February 10 2018, @10:43AM
That was my first thought as well.
However - if they demand to use all cores (and HT) at peak then I'd chose the ads but if they would settle for - say - 25% of each core (no HT) or set it at a fixed MIPS then it would be darn interesting.
(I don't want the fans to ramp up on my system)
And as alluded, if they would have a "would you mind if we mined with the same cycles as the ads otherwise would eat?" then it would make it a nice ad-free experience.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday February 12 2018, @09:28AM
erotic proportions
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:15AM
> If you're looking at porn, you're probably not doing much serious stuff on you machine at the same time...
Unless you're looking at porn to kill time while your parallelised number-crunching code is running. (Um, or so I heard.)
> So, between mining a few coins and having ugly disruptive flashing ads, what's the better solution to get that content provider a few pennies for that bandwidth?
Hah, like there's a snowball's chance in hell of them removing ads after adding a cryptominer. You'll spend half your cycles on Javascript ads, and the rest on Javascript mining.