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from the all-your-browsers-are-belong-to-us dept.
There has been a trend to burden visitors of javascript-infested web sites further by mining cryptocurrencies on the visiting machines. Sometimes it is the site hosting the web pages being visited doing the mining. Sometimes it is third parties. A recent report from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, looks at the ethics behind browser-based cryptocurrency mining, focusing on the case of Coinhive.
According to the report, ethical problems remain even when a user voluntarily consents to their CPU being used for mining, as the user might not fully understand that to which they are signing. While they might benefit from a lack of ads or higher quality video streaming on the site, they could also be stuck with "higher energy bills, along with accelerated device degradation, slower system performance, and a poor web experience."
Also, economics are addressed to a more limited extent. From the actual report:
While visits to parked domains are considerably shorter than an average website, the data spans a period of three months and gives some insight into the profitability of cryptojacking. During the experimental period of about 3 months, they accumulated 105 580 user sessions for an average of 24 seconds per session. For the period examined, the revenue was 0.02417 XMR (Monero's currency) which at the time of writing is valued at $7.69 USD.
In other words, cryptojacking burns a lot of electricity, slows down the CPU, degrades the web experience, and in return pays the malfeasants a pittance.
From Arxiv.org : A First Look at Browser-based Cryptojacking (warning for PDF).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @06:46PM (2 children)
How long have we been telling people not to blindly run binaries they downloaded from the internet. I fail to see how javascript is any different.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday March 12 2018, @09:31PM (1 child)
What I can't understand is why people run a computer without some kind of CPU usage monitor. Just a small icon on the taskbar will do. If it's stuck at 100% when you're not running some intensive computation, you know something is wrong, and go check what program is using the CPU.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday March 13 2018, @07:19AM
^ Yeah, that intern can't be trusted with your CPU time.