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

And getting to the data, getting meaningful information from all that information the analytics team was hoarding was a huge pain. They were like "No throw, only take!" (https://i.imgur.com/q46L4QH.jpg)

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/

This article by Jakob Nielsen already called for them 20 years ago and if you read it today, it doesn't look like we moved a bit considering ads on websites.

The payment overhead with traditional payment options is just to big. Paypal has 30 cents per transactions IIRC? Way too much if you just want to proces a few cents or even a fraction of a cent. Systems like Flattr or Kachingle solve this in another interesting way but it's still not ideal.

Crypto currencies would solve nicely this problem but of course, there needs to be easier ways of getting them and paying with them. I have no doubts that the latter will come quickly (see also the new Payment Request API). The former, we'll have to see. But I'm optimistic and would be surprised if we didn't have that within 5 years.

And the cost to the society is few cents of electricity minus fraction of a cent the site gets, paid in fuel being wasted on producing that electricity.

Crypto mining is a disaster. If I were an evil mastermind who wanted to deepen the energy and climate problems of the world, cryptocurrencies is what I would push for.

The langsec approach of using formal recognizers that validate the validity of input before processing it in any way (stop creating weird machines!), and designing network protocols that are actually decidable without solving the halting problem (network input must be no more complex than deterministic context-free) should be considered the bare minimum for all network-associated software. It won't solve all security problems, but we should at least be handling the problems we know how to solve. Anything less should be considered severely unprofessional, and at least civilly negligent.

> The web seriously sucks.

Dan Geer discussed his terrifying visions of the future in a recent keynote[1][2]. The suck extends far beyond the web; "Cybersecurity and the future of humanity are conjoined". He gives many examples that demonstrate just how bad the suck is, and how ill-prepared the world is for these looming problems - at any level of society.

> The cumulative effect of the curves for computing, storage, and bandwidth is this: in 1986 you could fill the world's total storage using the world's total bandwidth in two days. Today, it would probably take nine months of the world's total bandwidth to fill the world's total storage, but because of replication, synchronization, and sensor-driven autonomy, it is no longer really possible to know how much data there is. Decision making that depends or depended on knowing how much data there is is over.

> The execution space on the web today is that the client is the server's server, its bondsman if not concubine. You intake Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) from everywhere and everyone. You are supposed to believe that trust is transitive but that risk is not. That is what Javascript does.

What is the solution?

> To be deadly serious about cybersecurity requires that --EITHER-- we damp down the rate of change, slowing it enough to give prediction operational validity --OR-- we purposely increase unpredictability so that the opposition's targeting exercise grows too hard for them to do. In the former, we give up many and various sorts of progress. In the latter, we give up many and various sorts of freedom as it would be the machines then in charge, not us. Either way, the conjoining is irreversible.

I'm wondering how bad this will get before the masses declare a Butlerian Jihad. I personally know a handful of people that already use a revolt against technology as their primary political belief.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcIiD4UUDE8

[2] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.rapid7.14ix17.txt