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Pirate Bay is Mining Cryptocurrency Again, No Opt Out (torrentfreak.com)
The Pirate Bay is mining cryptocurrency again, causing a spike in CPU usage among many visitors. From a report: For now, the notorious torrent site provides no option to disable it. The new mining expedition is not without risk. CDN provider Cloudflare previously suspended the account of a site that used a similar miner, which means that The Pirate Bay could be next. Last month The Pirate Bay caused some uproar by adding a Javascript-based cryptocurrency miner to its website. The miner utilizes CPU power from visitors to generate Monero coins for the site, providing an extra source of revenue. [...] The Pirate Bay currently has no opt-out option, nor has it informed users about the latest mining efforts. This could lead to another problem since Coinhive said it would crack down on customers who failed to keep users in the loop.
I would have thought the people who knew about torrents were among the same people who use adblockers and NoScript.
How could a website dedicated to helping facilitate the widespread distribution of pirated materials engage in anything unethical? It's almost like they don't give a crap about anything except making money off the backs of other's work.
Turn Javascript off, dummies.
I assume one could "opt out" using NoScript.
It's annoying to be put in that position... but it's not as if it's particularly novel for end users to be forced into taking action to stop web sites from doing things we don't want them doing.
#DeleteChrome
Seriously. Most of us have cores sitting idle. Instead of being abused / tracked / annoyed / occasionally infected by advertising, why not let sites do a small amount of mining while we visit?
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Javascript.
anyone else having windows crash from a thread error ?
this code may be causing it.
If you have been there recently, every second link you click has code injected to open a BUY VPN NOW! page. even magent links do this so i have to close the popup tab and click again.
still a valuable resource. Lots of torrent websites shut down recently. no script makes quick work of these sorts of things so no biggy for me, but i no longer recommend the site to normal users.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Feel like there might be a joke or two out there.
Best wordplay wins. And go.
.. after having closed the tab?
I couldn't even reach it but got stuck in some proxy to site thingy but could access through some cloudflare always on thingy by also search on it so maybe the first thing with not accessible was just a short thing.
I think our government here in Sweden want the ISPs to block it and that they are forced to do it so I don't know why I can't access it at all really. (Without VPN that is.)
Someone will figure out how to corrupt the results of these distributed mining operations. And then there goes your precious Bitcoin.
Just get what you need and remember to get out. Annoying, but not really a problem worth going on about.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I recently had a media box with a seized fan die on me. I didn't know about it until just now and the CPU fan had clearly been seized for awhile and was playing video just fine. I was using the system as a light duty media box. Makes me wonder if I left it on the pirate bay site and the CPU activity caused it to die.
They steal from you, they steal from others, you steal from others.
Enjoy your time in hell.
i think the issue is that they aren't notifying users, nor providing a way to opt out.
if they were up front about it, i'd think most people would consider it a fair trade.
crooks don't play fair: news at 11.
"No Script" add-on to your browser.. adds a whitelist blocker, stops all scripts unless you specifically allow it. I allow just the ones required for a site to run.. nothing else. I get no pop-ups, no pop-under, streaming video ads, JavaScript ads... nothing. And no stupid attempts to use my machine to mine shit like this. course I haven't been to pirate bay in something like 4 or 5 years but still. other site try shady shit and it doesn't work. add in virus protection and regular cleaning tools like malware bytes ect.. and you're golden.
Seriously. Most of us have cores sitting idle. Instead of being abused / tracked / annoyed / occasionally infected by advertising, why not let sites do a small amount of mining while we visit?
Seriously. Most web pages have whitespace and other useless areas. Instead of being pestered for subscriptions, why not put something to generate revenue there.
It's a slippery slope. I expect we'll have miner-blocker add-ons by the end of the year.
It seems pretty reasonable to me, especially if they let you know they are doing it. Many people would love to donate their cpu cycles to worthy causes like protein structure prediction. In winter at least, it's just creating heat which you were going to pay for anyhow.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
That's what it took? That's what had to happen for you idiots to finally realize that indiscriminately loading and running code from a constellation of reputation-less sources is -- and always was -- a FUCKING STUPID IDEA?!?!!
Here. Install it. Use it.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Use of a good ad blocker and some JavaScript filtering out.
You control your browser.
Unless it's by a "rather big company". In this case it controls you.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
You can opt out by not visiting the site. Same as a regular business. You opt out not by trying to change their business practices but by not doing business with them. If you think something is too expensive, you don't take the product without paying, you just leave it on the shelf, or don't enter the store in the first place.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Too bad it's using my CPU cycles during the day, when I want them for my own work. I would be happy (in principal) to donate my idle night-time CPU cycles to worthy causes. But that seems incompatible with this approach.
Which leads me to a question: When running Windows (in my case, under VMWare Workstation), does my computer really use additional power if its running some CPU intensive JavaScript code? Versus whatever other idling behavior Windows might be doing?
Because it would be intriguing to mine bitcoin for worthy causes during my computer's idle hours, if there's not a real, proportionate (perhaps disproportionate) electrical cost.
Only the truely stupid allow sites to run javascript without good reason.
And a pirate site has no good reason.
"No Opt Out" does not equate to TFA:
"The miner is not directly embedded in the site’s core code but runs through an ad script. Many ad blockers and anti-malware tools are stopping these request, but people who don’t use any will see a clear spike in CPU usage when they access the site."
buy your content. torrent is pointless for anything other than copyright infringement.
The lack of transparency is the bigger problem. Ignore for the moment that it's a torrent site. I don't want to be visiting *any* site where their business model depends on hiding what they're doing from their users.
Seriously. Most of us have cores sitting idle. Instead of being abused / tracked / annoyed / occasionally infected by advertising, why not let sites do a small amount of mining while we visit?
You're not paying in cores, your paying in watts, usually a directly quantifiable cost to the user. Alternatively you are also paying in battery life for mobile devices.
there is no more music and movies to be had via torrents, the only thing torrents are good for anymore is grabbing a Linux iso from a popular distro when the seeding is hot
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Preferably I want to have a global as well as a per-site configuration option which lets me choose how much CPU pages can use. Not running Javascript at all is often not a realistic option, but web programmers really need to get their act together and write more efficient pages. Not giving them 100% CPU could do that, and it would also allow us to throttle these CPU thieves.
If bitcoin mining is their chosen economic model to support their site, then an "opt out" policy is equivalent to providing their services for free. Paying for a service via a bitcoin mining operation running briefly on your computer is a much more sustainable income stream than advertising - even though bitcoin mining itself might be highly economically questionable, and may very well be little more than a pyramid scheme, it's still better than advertising.
They do need to be upfront, but they don't need to provide an "opt out", and nor should they.
Those who seed files are already giving up some bandwidth and cpu cycles, for the sake of others that want to download them. Letting TPB mine bitcoin at a reasonable rate, while inefficient, would still be a method of supporting the site without donating to them directly.
I'll be sad the day TPB isn't around to show their middle finger in the face of the RIAA and the DRM pushers. It'll mean the wild wild web just became that much more pacified and regimented.
What's the minimum amount of runtime the script needs before it can return something useful (ie: profitable) ?
If a user comes and goes in 5 minutes, is there any benefit to mining for such insignificant amounts of time?
Or are they hoping some users will leave the browser open and forget about it, allowing the hours of mining.
It only runs on the page when you're pirating. I use javascript off and adblock and privacy badger all on by default and only whitelist what site I want.
Stop whining about mining being worse than ads. There there same and annoying and turn them off.
or we opt out by blocking the crypto sites.
you're funny with all your prattle about "don't take the product without paying" since they're a torrent file distribution site. my sides.
Tested & verified uBlock Origin stops whatever TPB is cookin'. Why in the hell WOULDN'T you use an adblocker nowadays?
They have 'clear hover' stripes covering the magnet link and the same amount of space on the right side of the description/link box.
Once I figured that out I just started right clicking a little further over and it worked fine.
TPB is pretty much dead at this point. They only have two working trackers on all their magnet links (despite the fact that you can dynamically change trackers on magnets without affecting the magnet content, so dead trackers can be removed and live trackers added as needed on a day by day basis.) Furthermore with hijinks like these and the javascript coin mining, who would want to use them?
The problem is there are not many public alternatives left anymore and solutions like Tor or I2P trackers have not resulting in the expected uptick in users that was was expected for either network, both of which are either stagnating or shrinking in regards to expanded node or user counts, which is a major concern for the current and future anonymity of traffic on the networks.
Furthermore many people scoff at concerns surrounding Intel ME, ARM Trustzone, AMD PSP(A Trustzone implementation on an ARM core in newer AMD x86_64 systems and video cards), or Nvidia's firmware signing, and the possibility that any one or all of these could in fact be backdoored and be used to collect symmetric or asymmetric keys and exfiltrate them in a manner a user without complete DPI traffic monitoring equipment could discover and alert about, nevermind mitigate. If this is possible, or already happening, then *ALL* computer systems must be assumed compromised and all the current privacy networks collapse given that the majority of Tor, I2P, FreeNet, bittorrent, etc nodes are running x86 or ARM processors, and the capability is there for compromises that would provide up to 98 percent traffic compromise from under a few dozen to few hundred mostly related exploitable platforms. The only mitigation is either using slower processors without those backdoors (and ensuring none of the other necessary peripheral devices are network accessable and compromised), or designing and funding new hardware from the ground up to mitigate it, whether ASIC designs, or FPGA designs for devices with open toolchains (at this point the iCE40, Spartan 2 (partial?), and maybe partial support for one or two other FPGAs currently available. None of which have the clock rates or LUTs available to compete with even 20 year old ASIC hardware at this point.
I expect we'll have miner-blocker add-ons by the end of the year.
You mean...?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I couldn't think of something more needed, on the internet, than a way to monetize websites without spying on and advertising to users.
I fucking hate ads. I think the level of advertising we are exposed to is legitimately hurtful to our mental health, and I'll sacrifice a little extra heat and power draw to keep my favorite websites in business (ad free) any day.
This could lead to another problem since Coinhive said it would crack down on customers who failed to keep users in the loop.
What exactly is Coinhive going to do?
Serving possibly malware-containing links seems like a bigger issue than crypto mining which is at least safe.
Beyond intense CPU utilization, any tips on identifying this in firefox?
Mlive.com is a news site and their re-write of their comment system a few months back was awful. It always pegs a cpu at 100%, and this article makes me wonder if they are doing something like this to generate revenue.
Today's insufferable entitlement proles would most likely change sides if they were the ones creating and distributing their own unique content
What can said ex-proles do to reliably determine that their own content is in fact "unique," not unwittingly a substantial copy or derivative of an incumbent's work?
While not informing the user is definitely bad, I think having sites do crypto mining is actually a preferable option compared to everything else out there.
If I am doing something where every cpu cycle is critical, I probably wouldn't be browsing around anyway. If I'm browsing, that means I have cpu cycles to spare. The website operator makes some money from me so that they can stay operating, but unlike advertising, I don't have to worry about unknown entities surreptitiously tracking my movements and collecting personal data.
And if people *really* don't like it, as others have stated, they are already using noscript or similar tools.
If I could trust that the only thing a site is doing is running a crypto mining too, then I would have no problem leaving javascript running. Unfortunately thanks to all the idiocy of the various ad agencies and other malicious actors, I don't think it's possible for me to blindly trust *any* website ever again. Especially when the site is doing stuff without telling the user first.
People that use torrents want free stuff.
Or they want stuff but the publisher is unwilling to take the going price for a copy of a given type of work. Where's the legit U.S. home video release of the film Song of the South in any popular format?
Is this a bad thing? Pirate bay needs to fund itself and make money. None of the users are paying them for the services.. Other than using cpu cycles, is there a down side to this?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
You can avoid reloading the page every time without making it completely unviewable when javascript is disabled.
How is that done? With a big tree of nested <iframe> elements, such that each navigation reloads only a fraction of the page (and doesn't change the URL in the location bar because the history API is unavailable)?
There are three ways you can make your app available to script abstainers. If you have separated your model from your view, at least one should be practical.
But you're bypassing the silly advertising agencies that pay pennies to those sites, too.
If by "agencies" you mean ad exchanges, why does advertising have to go through ad exchanges? Why can't advertisers buy ad space directly on each publisher's site? This way, the money would go directly to the publisher, and serving them wouldn't require third-party scripts or even scripts at all.
A simple way to opt out of this is to set the Java extension to ask for permission prior to each run.
Doing this for Java and Flash both disables those irritating automatic start videos as well.
NRRPT/RCT
Hosts protect where addons can't (or as well):
Bad sites (past ads)
Botnet C&Cs
DNS down or poisoned
Trackers (dns logs/ads/transparent ISP proxy)
Dns blocks
Spam/phish payload
Slowdown 2 ways: adblocks & hardcodes
Hosts = Ez edit.
AB+ 151mb https://www.google.com/search?q=Adblock+memory+consumption&btnG=Search&hl=en&gbv=1/
UBlock 64MB https://www.google.com/search?q=UBlock+memory+consumption&btnG=Search&hl=en&gbv=1/
Hosts~16mb
Addons = ClarityRay defeatable & crippled http://www.businessinsider.com/google-microsoft-amazon-taboola-pay-adblock-plus-to-stop-blocking-their-ads-2015-2/
NoScript tag parses. Hosts block script prior to it!
No 1 addon does as much.
Stacked addons slowup.
ADDONS = EXPLOITABLE https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11166303&cid=55266729/
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