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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?
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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
.. 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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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?
If I could buy all my content in HD I would (and do when available). Reality is it isn't available for purchase due to the exclusive deals with crappy providers, a movie industry that cares more for money than quality and an attitude that still thinks it is the 1980's for content distribution models.
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.
Serving possibly malware-containing links seems like a bigger issue than crypto mining which is at least safe.
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.
getting Archlinux isn't copyright infringement...
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