Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
People that use torrents want free stuff.
You make it sound so tawdry, perhaps because you failed to identify the most important distinction: free as in beer, or as in speech? Many of the people who want "free stuff" are more than happy to buy their media, but only without DRM. People who don't want DRM and do want privacy actually overlap quite nicely.
That is complete BS.
Most of the people who want "free stuff" are people who are too cheap to pay even $1 to get or rent stuff LEGALLY. In other words, they are cheap and even if the media was DRM free, they would still pirate it.
What's the real difference? How do you know the miner script isn't doing tracking / infesting your PC with malware? The javascript behind it is exactly the same - whether it's annoying displaying an ad, or mining.
If you say it's because it's first party, remember advertising started out that way too - every site handled their own advertising. Then came along ad networks which made it easier for website creators to have ads. It's only a matter of time before mining becomes a network and all you have to do is join a mining network. Said mining network can also track you across the web like ads do, as well as potentially be infected with dodgy scripts that install all sorts of weird crap, like ads do.
> Many of the people who want "free stuff" are more than happy to buy their media, but only without DRM.
Don't assume that just because you're some high-thinking technological idealist that everyone else is too. People torrent Game of Thrones because they don't have an HBO GO login to bum off of someone else, not because they're making some statement about DRM.