BOFH?
Some BOFH after a little on the side maybe?
The websites of US telly giant CBS's Showtime contained JavaScript that secretly commandeered viewers' web browsers over the weekend to mine cryptocurrency. The flagship Showtime.com and its instant-access ShowtimeAnytime.com sibling silently pulled in code that caused browsers to blow spare processor time calculating new …
Yet another reason to avoid sites that don't work when Javascript is blocked.
If I was a site owner who was using this tech (I actually feel like I was partly responsible for it due to very early experiments with it a bunch of years ago mining bitcoins years before the current incarnations) - it doesn't seem like it would matter if a percentage of your visitors disable js to stop it working. The aim of the game is going to be the percentage of visitors that don't prevent it running doing some work in a small transaction to cover your costs and in return not get obtrusive ads. In the end I considered it ethically sketchy to just throw it at users but it's a choice - publishers could offer people the option to live in an ad-free environment or not have to pay cash to get through a paywall and it could work for everybody. Could.
"Reg now behind invisible HTML5 Bitcoin paywall"
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/01/invisible_bitcoin_paywall/
I don’t know why the author thinks that CBS itself wouldn’t be likely to pull this kind of shenanigans. CBSI, a.k.a. CBS Interactive, a subsidiary of CBS, runs a little website called download.com. You remember download.com. They’re the people who would wrap 13 or so pieces of adware, junkware, spyware, etc. around shareware downloads that would then pollute the computers of clueless users.
"this script could allowed publishers to pull annoying ads from their website – which is something that could become more important as browsers increasingly block ads."
utter bollocks, read:
this script could allowed publishers to retain ads AND make them extra, mined cash
btw, is there a firefox extension to block mining yet? ;)
Just remembered donating spare CPU cycles back in the day.
Which makes me wonder if there is any mileage in running a miner on behalf of a charity using spare CPU cycles, or if it would be more cost efficient (due to the cost of the electricity) to just donate direct
I mined about 0.1 bitcoin a couple of years ago, as an experiment, when it's value was about £200 a coin. I stopped running the hardware when the pool payouts dropped to less than one in 3 months due to the increased network hash rate. The cost of the hardware and electricity (IIRC, about £200 for the USB miners and a RaspPi) are now just about paid for if Bitcoin's value stays above £3k or so.
Were you comparing the cost of electricity of the computer on vs off, or "on with mining" vs "on but dle (not mining)"?
Because I have some PCs that are on anyway and might as well be mining.
ps SETI@Home still exists, along with many other projects on the BOINC platform you can donate your CPU/GPU time to many good causes, and some silly ones too.
So I usually play Netflix or something in the background while I game (Farming Simulator 17, hit me up Merkel).
When I decided to watch something on my computer off my DVR, the performance was heavily impacted. Not sure why Netflix can stream HD content to my PC and run fine but Xfinity cant stream HD content in the same house and I run into framerate issues. But now I wonder if I wasn't mining crypto-currency for some disgruntled IT folks the whole time.
The IRL Youtube streamer Ice Poseidon recently got a lot of flak from his viewers when a developer for one of Ice's apps/projects did a similar thing. Ice claims it was the dev going rogue but some still believe Ice wanted it to squeeze out a few extra dimes from the viewers, others think it was done for the "content" i.e. a bit of drama to spice up the stream.
Coin Hive's pitch is that this script could allowed publishers to pull annoying ads from their website – which is something that could become more important as browsers increasingly block ads.
That's not much of a pitch, since any ad blocker can also filter scripts. There's already at least one filter list for crypto mining.