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Showtime Websites Are Mining Monero With Your CPU, Unclear If Hack Or Experiment (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Two Showtime domains are currently loading and running Coinhive, a JavaScript library that mines Monero using the CPU resources of users visiting Showtime's websites. The two domains are showtime.com and showtimeanytime.com, the latter being the official URL for the company's online video streaming service. It is unclear if someone hacked Showtime and included the mining script without the company's knowledge. Showtime did not respond to a request for comment, but it could be an experiment as the setThrottle value is 0.97, meaning the mining script will remain dormant for 97% of the time. Despite this, Coinhive has been recently adopted by a large number of malware operations, such as malvertisers, adware developers, rogue Chrome extensions, and website hackers, who secretly load the code in a page's background and make money off unsuspecting users. At least two ad blockers have added support for blocking Coinhive's JS library -- AdBlock Plus and AdGuard -- and developers have also put together Chrome extensions that terminate anything that looks like Coinhive's mining script -- AntiMiner, No Coin, and minerBlock.
The Pirate Bay recently ran tests using Coinhive. A recent report has calculated that a site like The Pirate Bay could make around $12,000 per month by mining Monero in the background.
The Pirate Bay recently ran tests using Coinhive. A recent report has calculated that a site like The Pirate Bay could make around $12,000 per month by mining Monero in the background.
Doing it this way, unannounced and underhanded is wrong. However, if done in an upfront and informed way I would likely accept some form of low impact mining on my PC while consuming content over most forms of advertisement.
I would gladly donate CPU time to support a site instead of viewing ads.
I might even idle my browser there---if it doesn't affect anything else I do. They really need to have a light touch though.
And, it should go without saying, but no mining on mobile. If I have to choose between bandwidth for ads and battery life, I'll take the ads.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
CPU mining has a return of between 1 and essentially 0% depending on the currency and the price of electricity. Best case scenario, you leave you web browser open for two days, you consume $1 of extra electricity and the web site gets $0.01. Unless the browser could leverage your GPU, you live in Quebec (cheap electricity) and it's winter so you are heating your house with the GPU, this is never going to make sense.
The real question is, I guess: Is this better or worse than ads? Pretty much everyone hates ads. This, ostensibly, would run silently in the background. If you're informed it's happening, and making a very broad assumption that there isn't going to be any malicious code being executed (implies they protect it from being hacked/repurposed into something malicious) is it a better solution for funding websites instead of ads?