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The Pirate Bay is piggybacking on visitors' CPUs to mine cryptocurrency

Shaanyboi

Banned
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How is this at all an interesting alternative to ads? Ads at least bombard you with marketing based on your information, but this is taking your resources in order to profit off of you. If anything this is worse, especially considering human nature means people will look for shady ways to get this done regardless of opt-in clauses bc give an inch = take a mile.

Never in my wildest dreams would I ever see people being okay with someone using their technology and resources to profit off of them. Talk about literally fucking them over.

So let's say i really liked a website on sponges, but i hate ads. This great website on sponges offers me two choices. Either deal with lots of intrusive ads, or i let them use 20% of my cpu while I'm on their site.

Even if I'm on their website oogling sponges for hours, it's still likely cheaper on me in wear and tear and electricity than paying a subscription. It's fairer to the website owners too because I'm not using an ad blocker and denying them revenue.


The key here is being given the option. That's were tpb is shitty. This wasnt a choice.
 

RMI

Banned
I mean if you are going to a website specifically to steal shit don't get mad if they want to borrow a little back.
 

coolasj19

Why are you reading my tag instead of the title of my post?
I would opt into this for the entire internet.
Trading power and cpu bandwidth for my own time? Genius.
 

M3d10n

Member
The inevitable result of allowing advertisers to deliver and run unsolicited executable code on everyone's browsers.

Navigating the web on mobile and on a laptop not plugged in is already a major battery drain due to websites routinely loading and running 3rd party scripts at least an order of magnitude larger than the content they present. Now everyone and their mother will try to get your CPU to constant 100% utilization in order to mine bitcoins.

...and, they'll also be able to use people's freaking GPUs to mine cryptocurrency, courtesy of WebGL. God help us all if the shady advertisers who like to run mobile redirect ads on GAF get wind of this.
 
If only Neogaf did this back when bitcoin was new we could all be rich, Swimming in PS Vita memory cards while browsing with Neogaf Gold.
 
So let's say i really liked a website on sponges, but i hate ads. This great website on sponges offers me two choices. Either deal with lots of intrusive ads, or i let them use 20% of my cpu while I'm on their site.

Even if I'm on their website oogling sponges for hours, it's still likely cheaper on me in wear and tear and electricity than paying a subscription. It's fairer to the website owners too because I'm not using an ad blocker and denying them revenue.


The key here is being given the option. That's were tpb is shitty. This wasnt a choice.

Yeah no, I'd rather intrusive ads or ads in general. I'm not going to risk cpu issues and increased battery draining just because of a one-sided deal where they use my resources to make money. Especially like I said, people will be shady about this, so this whole idea of having options isn't even a guarantee to protect yourself from taking a mile after giving an inch.
 

KHarvey16

Member
Yeah no, I'd rather intrusive ads or ads in general. I'm not going to risk cpu issues and increased battery draining just because of a one-sided deal where they use my resources to make money. Especially like I said, people will be shady about this, so this whole idea of having options isn't even a guarantee to protect yourself from taking a mile after giving an inch.

If it's abused it'll be stopped. I'm not worried at all.
 

Drkirby

Corporate Apologist
Would making use of Javascript VMs of a ton of users even be worth it? I imagine even like 1k users would give less hashing power than a single good GPU, and most would only be hashing for a few minutes.

Can they offload to your GPU with Javascript these days?
thinking.gif



I really think this will make them less money than normal ads.
 

Mohasus

Member
How is this at all an interesting alternative to ads? Ads at least bombard you with marketing based on your information, but this is taking your resources in order to profit off of you. If anything this is worse, especially considering human nature means people will look for shady ways to get this done regardless of opt-in clauses bc give an inch = take a mile.

Never in my wildest dreams would I ever see people being okay with someone using their technology and resources to profit off of them. Talk about literally fucking them over.

Damn those TV channels making money out of my electricity!!!

Not all ads are like that. I don't want to know that single moms want to fuck near my area and have 2 or 3 new windows open when I click at something that isn't the ad.

My CPU usage right now is 4%, I can easily spare some to visit a website.
 

Iadien

Guarantee I'm going to screw up this post? Yeah.
I would be okay with this if it meant I never had to see an ad again and was still supporting the sites I visited.
 
Damn those TV channels making money out of my electricity!!!

Not all ads are like that. I don't want to know that single moms want to fuck near my area and have 2 or 3 new windows open when I click at something that isn't the ad.

My CPU usage right now is 4%, I can easily spare some to visit a website.

The TV analogy fails hard, because there's nothing additional that's draining your power or using your resources in addition to the content you're already getting from cable. Your logic would be like saying "mannn damn internet making money out of my electricity!!" which has nothing to do with miners.

Also getting windows open is weird considering popup blockers are a basic feature. Those ads on the other hand, would really only be viewable in seedy/porn sites (I could be wrong, but I haven't seen them in the sites I usually visit).
 
Now everyone and their mother will try to get your CPU to constant 100% utilization in order to mine bitcoins.

...and, they'll also be able to use people's freaking GPUs to mine cryptocurrency, courtesy of WebGL. God help us all if the shady advertisers who like to run mobile redirect ads on GAF get wind of this.

Hmm... Will they be able to start selling your CPU/GPU cycles in the future for other computing tasks as well.
 

DrSlek

Member
Does adblock block this?

Although if I dont notice it then Im fine with it. rip tehparadox

It sounds like it's a javascript process that runs while you're on the website. So I'd imagine noscript would stop it from running in the first place.

As long as it only runs while I'm on the site, I think I'd be okay with this.
I would hope it doesn't become ubiquitous though.
 
Yeah no, I'd rather intrusive ads or ads in general. I'm not going to risk cpu issues and increased battery draining just because of a one-sided deal where they use my resources to make money. Especially like I said, people will be shady about this, so this whole idea of having options isn't even a guarantee to protect yourself from taking a mile after giving an inch.


That's great, you can decide not to and deal with ads sir use an ad blocker if you are so inclined. Options are good. If you're worried about unscrupulous websites doing this, install noscript.

I'm not saying force this on anyone, but if this model could become viable and an agreement can be made between websites and viewers more options is better than fewer.
 

Tobor

Member
You guys are fucking nuts. This is severely stupid. Hopefully every major browser blocks this shit immediately.
 
You guys are fucking nuts. This is severely stupid. Hopefully every major browser blocks this shit immediately.

They aren't going to stop this, they are actually giving browsers more access to your pc, not less. If you're that concerned Search your browser add-ons for noscript.
 
You guys are fucking nuts. This is severely stupid. Hopefully every major browser blocks this shit immediately.

Visiting a website on the internet is making an invisible agreement to execute whatever HTML and Javascript they choose to send you. Now, the rules behind this are myriad, incredibly complicated, and much stricter these days than they used to be. But as a general rule, the domain you are visiting can execute essentially arbitrary Javascript within the confines of the browser and send the results back to themselves. That's what this is likely doing: spinning off some webworkers to do whatever mining calculations need to be done and sending the results back to their servers.

It's not as easy as you might think for the browser to block it without potentially screwing up legitimate uses for these technologies. Things like Noscript can block it, but will also likely completely ruin many websites you visit (unless you whitelist them, in which case it's not doing anything anyway).
 

norog

Member
I can't believe how many people don't run NoScript by default. It's an easy tell for garbage sites, too: if I have to allow more than 2-3 domains to make the site work, it isn't worth visiting.
 
TPB also blamed the high CPU usage on a "small typo" that was causing its site to utilize every available cycle when a user visited its website.

Why does this remind me of Office Space where the programmer accidentally misplaced a comma in their money harvester program and it harvested millions instead of thousands.
 

Sullichin

Member
it's an interesting idea but these miners are going to make for a horrible browsing experience. JS ads can already be super fucking heavy and slow down your browser, and they aren't asking your CPU to mine cryptos
 

NimbusD

Member
Honestly, I think running a crypto miner in place of ads is a pretty awesome idea, but it should absolutely be opt in and well explained that it'll eat your cpu.
Yeah for real. I'd actually be down for that, just fucking be transparent about it, don't shadily run shit on my computer like that.
 
People that think this can use your GPU or WebGL, it doesn't. Monero is a CPU oriented coin. That said I'd have to agree with a lot of the posters here and say this has a huge risk of abuse. If it was opt in, that is a different story.
 
I ran this for myself a little while just to look at some stats and figured I'd share them with you guys.

Let's assume that a banner ad that someone runs on their site generates roughly 50 cents per thousand views (I'm not sure if this is quite right, it could be high, I'm more familiar with reward video ads which is closer 6-7 dollars per thousand views.)

At 0.00016446 XMR per 1M hashes, you'd need about 60 thousand hashes to reach one tenth of a penny.

If you don't use this miner to use up all the CPU, I think the average user might do like 50 hashes a second.

So roughly 10,000 seconds of web page view for a penny. I feel like that's pretty rough and I doubt this will replace advertisements any time soon. And this is assuming a site will just run the miner without informing any of their users. Even if you want to assume that Monero takes off and become 1k each, you still need a lot of retention on your site to make it worth it.
 

SOR5

Member
VERY stupid idea, if this ever becomes more widespread I don't want 10 browsing tabs to destroy and mine my CPU

Im not always one to call for a slippery slope argument but hooo boy
 
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