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CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

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Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#102

Post by wolco »

icanhackit wrote: post #81
wolco wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running this at full speed will turn on your fan on and having this running could damage or limit the life of your computer. It's like driving for uber where in the end you pay more for repairs than you would in salary.

At the end of my post I suggested it be standardised at the browser level for this purpose. Just because the implementation sucks now doesn't mean it has to always suck.

It is a non scalable model. The more people who use this the greater the rating for mining. Currently it takes 5.5 billion hashes to meet the min payment for coinhive. At full power you might get 30h/s per person on a desktop or 15h/s on a phone. If you had 10000 mobile visitors who came everyday and stayed 1 minute it would take 10000 days to get min payout: 1/2 a monero coin so about 40/50 dollars. I don't see how this will replace advertising where one affilate sale could replace this income.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#103

Post by Kiro »

CoryHallpdp11 wrote: post #63
damnstraight wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only really makes sense with browser-level cpu scheduling. Otherwise there's no real way to throttle the amount of cpu these bitcoin miners take from you. Without that, I think people are unlikely to be sympathetic and they'll be snagged by ad blockers rapidly: consent is the cornerstone of products people like.

adblock-nocoin-list https://github.com/hoshsadiq/adblock-nocoin-list/

Why would they block miner.pr0gramm.com, which is only used in one specific place (the pr0gramm site itself) where you need to explicitly press a start button to mine?

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#105

Post by Tepix »

Animats wrote: post #104

So where are the arrests under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

By visiting a web page with JavaScript enabled, don't you consent to running the code they send you? If so, there is no crime.

By the way it appears we need a (configurable) CPU/GPU cycle limit for JavaScript code in browsers now...

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#106

Post by iamgopal »

jakeogh wrote: post #84

as if I needed another reason to browse with JS disabled. https://github.com/jakeogh/glide (dont use the recent commits)

The other day someone was ranting about web app technologies. This is actually nice idea. A browser without javascript. For all the fun interaction, browser may add extensions of widgets. Let all richness be supplied by browser.

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#107

Post by Animats »

Tepix wrote: post #105
Animats wrote: post #104

So where are the arrests under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

By visiting a web page with JavaScript enabled, don't you consent to running the code they send you? If so, there is no crime. By the way it appears we need a (configurable) CPU/GPU cycle limit for JavaScript code in browsers now...

There's a $5000 threshold for stealing CPU time. A mining program might hit that.

knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period;

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#108

Post by Tepix »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #15

Is this a violation of the CFAA? Without explicit permission to do this, it seems an awful lot like unauthorized use

What's the difference (legally speaking) between a badly programmed inefficient ad that hogs your CPU and some mining code?

Re: CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

#109

Post by usrusr »

dmichulke wrote: post #98

Here's a gray market "business model": - Hacker H hacks site, injects cryptomining script - Because H doesn't want other hackers to do the same, he will make the site secure and thereby kind of "maintain" it (in a security sense) - Because H doesn't want the site to slow down endlessly, he will use cryptomining "as much as possible" while still keeping the site sufficiently responsive (otherwise traffic would go down…

Nothing gray about that.

But it could make an entertaining short story, with H eventually sitting in meetings with everybody not realizing that nobody hired him, H himself slowly forgetting that, an intermediate crisis when H's position is threatened after a merger and a dramatic finale when all is revealed after H is chosen as the next CEO.

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