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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

#181

Post by jdmichal »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #133
lewisl9029 wrote: post #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,…

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

I just did the math for my machine, because why not...

I was getting 35 hashes a second on my stock i5 2500K [0] with four threads. This was enough to get my fans revving up more than any game I ever play. For that rate, it works out to ~0.0018 USD per hour, using their 47 USD rate for the .5 XMR minimum payout.

[0] https://ark.intel.com/products/52210/Intel-Core-i5-2500K-Pro...

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

#182

Post by kbart »

jacquesm wrote: post #174
pr0gramm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's worth it depends on the site, your target audience and the ads you'd be allowed to show based on your content. At this point, we (Coinhive) have paid out 992 XMR (about $89.000) to our users. We started this service 11 days ago.

$89.000 or $89,000?

This still doesn't clear things up (both "," and "." can be used as thousands and fractions separation symbol, depending on locale). A more international way is to use whitespace or nothing at all for thousands ($89 000 or $89000) and use "," or "." (depending on locale) for fractions only.

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

#183

Post by criddell »

kbart wrote: post #180
TeMPOraL wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity 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.

Why do you think that minor cryptocurrencies mining operations are worse in regards of wasted fuel than playing computer games, watching mindless YouTube videos, scrolling Facebook, leaving devices on when not used, lighting places 24/7 where nobody goes at night anyway etc.? We, as society, waste an enormous amount of resources anyway, I don't see how mining in browser would even dent that. Sure, these mega cryptocu…

Mining in a browser is going to consume my battery and bandwidth and you shouldn't be surprised that people aren't happy about that.

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

#184

Post by TeMPOraL »

trophycase wrote: post #179
TeMPOraL wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost to the viewer is ultimately a few cents of electricity 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.

What about the millions and millions of man hours that go into creating and distributing advertising? Surely that's also an enormous waste?

It is. And I speak out frequently against it.

Advertising today is mostly a zero-sum game, where all the effort you put into it goes to offset the equivalent effort your competitor puts into it. Thus it forms a feedback loop of ever increasing waste.

Still, this topic is not relevant to discussion about merits of cryptocurrencies.

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

#185

Post by kbart »

criddell wrote: post #183
kbart wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that minor cryptocurrencies mining operations are worse in regards of wasted fuel than playing computer games, watching mindless YouTube videos, scrolling Facebook, leaving devices on when not used, lighting places 24/7 where nobody goes at night anyway etc.? We, as society, waste an enormous amount of resources anyway, I don't see how mining in browser would even dent that. Sure, these mega cryptocu…

Mining in a browser is going to consume my battery and bandwidth and you shouldn't be surprised that people aren't happy about that.

"Mining in a browser is going to consume my battery and bandwidth"

You mean just like ads do? Of course, in a perfect world we wouldn't have either, but I just don't see clear distinction between mining in browser or ads or other useless/annoying things (from the user perspective).

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

#186

Post by detaro »

kbart wrote: post #185
criddell wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining in a browser is going to consume my battery and bandwidth and you shouldn't be surprised that people aren't happy about that.

"Mining in a browser is going to consume my battery and bandwidth" You mean just like ads do? Of course, in a perfect world we wouldn't have either, but I just don't see clear distinction between mining in browser or ads or other useless/annoying things (from the user perspective).

People are unhappy about the kind of ads that do that excessively too.

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

#188

Post by jaxn »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #71
jaxn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems likely to me too, but did the article say that? Or is there another source?

In the article: > "Upon reviewing our products and code, the HTML comments shown in the screenshot that are referencing newrelic were not injected by New Relic's agents. It appears they were added to the website by its developers." > [Coin Hive] did confirm to us, however, that the email address used to set up the account was a personal one, and was not an official CBS email address, further suggesting malicious acti…

Yeah, it was obvious it was never NewRelic. But it is not obvious if it was a contractor, and employee, or someone who gained access through other means.

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

#189

Post by csomar »

pr0gramm wrote: post #125
csomar wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that mining through the browser is very inefficient. I don't have numbers but it'd probably cost an order of magnitude more, at least, to mine on the browser. And I'm talking about CPU cryptos, forget about bitcoin.

That may be true for Ethereum or Bitcoin, but not for Monero. The Coinhive Monero miner is about 65% as fast as a native miner would be, at least in Browsers that support WASM. Disclaimer: I wrote the Coinhive Monero miner.

Thank you very much for this information. Supports for WASM looks decent. Looking into it now!

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

#190

Post by kbart »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #171

Is there a tool like an AdBlocker for crypto coin miners ? Or are they recognized by AdBlockers ?

You can always block JS from known sources that do this (use NoScript or similar), though I don't know any automatic way yet.
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