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Google Engineers Explore Ways To Stop In-Browser Cryptocurrency Miners in Chrome (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by msmash on from the brainstorming dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Google Chrome engineers are considering adding a special browser permission that will thwart the rising trend of in-browser cryptocurrency miners. Discussions on the topic of in-browser miners have been going on the Chromium project's bug tracker since mid-September when Coinhive, the first such service, launched. "Here's my current thinking," Ojan Vafai, a Chrome engineering working on the Chromium project, wrote in one of the recent bug reports. "If a site is using more than XX% CPU for more than YY seconds, then we put the page into 'battery saver mode' where we aggressively throttle tasks and show a toast [notification popup] allowing the user to opt-out of battery saver mode. When a battery saver mode tab is backgrounded, we stop running tasks entirely. I think we'll want measurement to figure out what values to use for XX and YY, but we can start with really egregious things like 100% and 60 seconds. I'm effectively suggesting we add a permission here, but it would have unusual triggering conditions [...]. It only triggers when the page is doing a likely bad thing."

An earlier suggestion had Google create a blacklist and block the mining code at the browser level. That suggestion was shut down as being too impractical and something better left to extensions.

11 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Ad company defends business model by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Company threatened by emergence of a new model of online compensation uses control over existing infrastructure to severely limit its penetration into the market.

    Big surprise.

    1. Re:Ad company defends business model by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Ignoramus web forum poster can't tell the difference between ads and cryptocurrency mining, has no idea what he's talking about, makes snarky comment.
      Big surprise.

    2. Re:Ad company defends business model by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Company threatened by emergence of a new model of online compensation uses control over existing infrastructure to severely limit its penetration into the market.

      Not really. Running a miner is not a way that legitimate content sites recover their cost of operation. It's a way to grab some of the viewer's cycles for mining without their knowing it. If you want viewers to pay for use of your site in CPU cycles, design a protocol for that which will tell the user what they're paying, and allow them to pay it fairly or inform their decision to stay off your site.

      --
      Bruce Perens.
    3. Re:Ad company defends business model by spire3661 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      >Running a miner is not a way that legitimate content sites recover their cost of operation

      You could make the exact same argument for third-party ads.

      --
      Good-bye
    4. Re:Ad company defends business model by Dogtanian · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How honest would you expect them to be, given that mining via JavaScript is going to be horrendously inefficient and likely to use many, many times the value mined in increased electricity used by the client?

      They'd also have to be clear that using the website is likely to run down the user's battery significantly faster on a laptop.

      Then again- maybe that was your point. You can't do something like that honestly without highlighting what a bad idea it is, and that it'd be far better if someone finally got micropayments to work for random websites.

      --
      "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
  2. Re: Blocker detected by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Good, I'd never go back to that site.

  3. Google should see this as a threat!!! by zippo01 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This would be a brilliant business strategy! No ads, clean uninterrupted browsing, they just get some CPU cycles from you. Most people wouldn't even notice the difference or the cost. I would do it not to have to look at ads. This could destroy googles hold on ads and the new revenue stream for the internet. They should just let the user know whats going on and BAM!

  4. Re:High cpu usage blocked? by slazzy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Even just showing something on the tab to indicate high cpu usage would be a good start, like the way chrome shows a speaker icon for the tab that is playing sounds.

    --
    Website Just Down For Me? Find out
  5. I like the idea, and not just for miners by pgn674 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's a documentation hub for a service out there that I noticed using 100% of one CPU core on my laptop, whenever I had a page open on it. Didn't matter whether the tab or Chrome window was foreground or not. I dug into it, and found a CSS spinner sitting underneath a Google translate button. I'm thinking the page designers wanted a spinner to show if that button took a while to load. But they designed it in CSS; it kept running forever, even after the button loaded; and it used 100% CPU. Having a built in defense against this kind of stupidity or malice would be awesome.

  6. Re:That's easy! by LordKronos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    LOL....yeah, there's not reason not to. Lets just abandon DHTML and go back to full page reloads on every action, not matter how small. It's been so long, I guess I must've forgotten how much I loved all those full page reloads.

  7. This will end poorly by Vektuz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While I actually like the idea of being allowed to choose whether to donate a few cycles or to watch ads - I would always choose to donate cycles (no privacy problem, no malware problem, no security problem, no tracking problem...).

    HOWEVER, this will end poorly
    This is because websites tend to be greedy. They won't go "either ads or cryptomining". They will go ads AND cryptomining. Just like cable TV.