Live data from Hacker News

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

go.theregister.com

131–140 of 220 posts

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

#131
If this becomes an open-source library that you can integrate into your app's own JavaScript blob and obfuscate, it can become ridiculously difficult to detect and distinguish from regular JavaScript processing in a sufficiently complex web app, as long as the actual mining is throttled to a reasonably low rate.

This seems like something that will inevitably be everywhere and displace some use cases for advertising, and could possibly even replace it entirely eventually. I personally see it as the lesser of two evils, as long as apps don't try to run miners at full throttle and thereby provide a horrible user experience, and instead operate it at say 95% idle and only when I'm actively using the app. Although in practice I realize this is almost impossible to identify and enforce.

I'd much rather offer some limited amount of compute on my devices to support content creation on the web and than to offer my privacy and be subjected to subliminal mind tricks 24/7 as I'm forced to in the status quo.

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

#132
post #114

I bet some clever person on the marketing team just went ahead and inserted the tag. My first experience on a large corporate dev team was eye-opening. While the core product code was version controlled and reviewed, the marketing team had the power to insert any kind of scripts onto the page without clearance. In theory, anything new on the page would require many ridiculous meetings. In practice, they could and did…

Ha, that gives me flashbacks! I worked in a similar environment where more than once the production site(s) (multi-country deployment, big brand) would show a blank screen because some ad script did a "document.write". Or some hastily-added external dependency would stop working and render the site unusable. The discrepancy between the care taken about deployment strategies and these regular issues always bothered me…

We iframed all the ads after a few of them f###ed with our website. It's not needed if you work with AdSense, but we had multiple vendors and private deals, custom ads of all kinds.

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

#133

If this becomes an open-source library that you can integrate into your app's own JavaScript blob and obfuscate, it can become ridiculously difficult to detect and distinguish from regular JavaScript processing in a sufficiently complex web app, as long as the actual mining is throttled to a reasonably low rate. This seems like something that will inevitably be everywhere and displace some use cases for advertising,…

I haven't done the maths, but I imagine even at full throttle it gives much less returns than advertising

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then your code wasn't version controlled and reviewed. I had a similar request for Google Tags and I explained my concerns to my CTO and voila, no Google Tags that didn't come through us.

It depends on the market pressure and resources you have. Low pressure, many resources (money) => Review/Implement all Google Tags changes High pressure, low resources (money) => Marketing can do their own thing to reduce pressure on the development team. HM and LL are somewhere in between. Classic trade off like most of the things in software development.

The kicker for me is that they expect you to act like they're doing you a favor and reducing your workload. Sorry, your next release is delayed because your previous attempt at "helping" is screwing things up.

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

#135

I bet some clever person on the marketing team just went ahead and inserted the tag. My first experience on a large corporate dev team was eye-opening. While the core product code was version controlled and reviewed, the marketing team had the power to insert any kind of scripts onto the page without clearance. In theory, anything new on the page would require many ridiculous meetings. In practice, they could and did…

Google Tag Manager! So flexible, so innovative!

Google Tag Manager is a serious game-changer that provides the kind of competitive edge our clients need.

- Caleb Whitmore, Founder & Chairman, Analytics Pros

You want to let Marketing add script tags on the fly? Are you fucking insane?

- Anonymous Developer

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

#136
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.

Next-up: Video-player extension caught mining...

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

#137

If this becomes an open-source library that you can integrate into your app's own JavaScript blob and obfuscate, it can become ridiculously difficult to detect and distinguish from regular JavaScript processing in a sufficiently complex web app, as long as the actual mining is throttled to a reasonably low rate. This seems like something that will inevitably be everywhere and displace some use cases for advertising,…

When browser tabs have audio, they get a little speaker icon. The same can be done for WebGL and WebCL.

https://github.com/derjanb/hamiyoca/issues/2#issuecomment-11...

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

#138

The web seriously sucks. One thing I admire, at least in theory, about Xbox 360 games or iOS apps is the limited access a specific program can run. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiqioE1zGCw talks about this Why is the overwhelming majority of networked software still not secure, despite all effort to the contrary? Why is it almost certain to get exploited so long as attackers can craft its inputs? Why is it the cas…

[deleted]

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

#139
post #100
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A customer base of hundreds thousands doing streaming will cost you way more than $50k/day.

Unless you just package it and let youtube do the actual streaming. Imagine creating "cat-videos.com" and embedding all the youtube videos into the site but providing a better UI for browsing them.

But you'd get both ads and mining. The point of mining was to get rid of ads!

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

#140
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"More than $BIGNUM entries? These guys know what they're doing!"
Post reply on HN