Slashdot Mirror
Salon Magazine Mines Monero On Your Computer If You Use an Ad Blocker (bbc.com)
dryriver shares a report from BBC: News organizations have tried many novel ways to make readers pay -- but this idea is possibly the most audacious yet. If a reader chooses to block its advertising, U.S. publication Salon will use that person's computer to mine for Monero, a cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin. Creating new tokens of a cryptocurrency typically requires complex calculations that use up a lot of computing power. Salon told readers: "We intend to use a small percentage of your spare processing power to contribute to the advancement of technological discovery, evolution and innovation." The site is making use of CoinHive, a controversial mining tool that was recently used in an attack involving government websites in the UK, U.S. and elsewhere. However, unlike that incident, where hackers took control of visitors' computers to mine cryptocurrency, Salon notifies users and requires them to agree before the tool begins mining.
News outlets have just no grasp of the reality of internet existing.
Seriously, I wanted to have some better news sources than the free papers they keep on train stations. So I paid over 200 bucks for a subscription, digital mind you, to Neue Zuercher Zeitung.
They still showed me ads and paid content even when logged in. My subscription has now run out. I see no difference in the content.
I mean what the hell?
Go ahead, mine something on my box. If the code is sandboxed - as should be the case with JS - and it doesn't slow to a grinding halt, I'm actually ok with that. But don't show me you annoying ads!
In fact, make it the default! And give me the option to choose ads over mining. That would actually be a huge improvement IMHO. No joke.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I love how advertising agencies talk about "improving the reader experience" and "serve ads that are relevant to you", yet the result inavriably seems to be ads that are harder to ignore and annoy the reader to the point where they will leave the site.
Dear advertisers: if you are serious about improving the reader experience, think about how your ad impresses on a reader who is not interested in whatever it is you're selling. Good ads provide info to people who are interested in your products, entice people who might be interested, and are easily ignored by people who have no interest. Of course many advertisers seem to think that there is no such thing as bad publicity, and believe that the population of people who are not and will never be interested in the product is zero. The result of that thinking is the immense popularity of ad blockers, and declining readership of sites who successfully lock out people using such blockers. If people go out of their way to avoid looking at your ad, that should be telling you something...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
WHAT? I COULDN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE NOISE OF MY CPU, CASE AND PSU FANS!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
BUT I MEAN TO BE YELLING
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I used to subscribe to the paper version of Wired and let my subscription lapse. They sent me to a collection agency for failure to renew a $12 subscription! How is not renewing a subscription the same as buying something and not paying for it?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard