What is the hashrate on these? Could'nt imagine it being very high...
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Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
71–80 of 94 posts
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#72I wonder if the new mobile GPU's are any good at mining scrypt-based currencies. It's possible that this could be fairly profitable. I don't think that long term this is going to replace ads though. Cryptocurrencies are too volatile at this point and I'd wager that ads are going to continue being much more profitable.
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#73Careful.. The New Jersey DA is trying to go after an MIT student for simply exploring the freemium mining concept at a hackathon. He got MIT and the EFF to back him, but there are probably others looking to make an example out of someone. http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/12/new-jersey-slaps-mit-bitco...
Yep, at RPI we had a research project doing something a bit similar by tying bitcoin transactions to the HTTP protocol itself to enable on-the-fly payments with an alternative of on-the-fly mining.
RPI lawyers told us to stop after we asked for counsel due to money transmitter laws. A few months later the MIT kid got hit with a subpoena. Bullet dodged for us but I really hope he pulls through with a win.
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#74I've been working on an idea similar to this for a few months. Instead of limiting this to crypto currency mining (a fair application, FWIW), why not approach this with the idea that people plugging in their phones every night could easily constitute the largest distributed supercomputer ever built? Everyone has the same nightly ritual: Wake up, use phone/tablet/device, plug in at night. Once it's plugged in, your ph…
Errr.... I know that phone chargers draw some power even when the phone isn't charging, but surely it's orders of magnitude less than what they draw when the attached device is running at full capacity.
Not to mention how hot the damn things could get.
So it's going to cost me electricity and probably shorten the life of my phone - why would I sign up?
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#75Sorry, irrespective of the legality or morality, this is quite a creative idea.
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#76This is pretty hilarious. Given how small the load can be to automatically contribute hashes to a pool for ___coin, I expect more of these in the future, but smarter. Runs for 5 seconds per minute on ten million devices for six months? That's no joke with some of the hardware out there. It's this close to a victimless crime (that is, unless the victim gets their CPU/GPU fried, as has happened with these nets before).…
Here's a story from 2004 about a school IT tech who installed SETI@home on the school machines. The increased electricity bill caused some consternation and he lost his job. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20041010/2225204.shtml I imagine that mining crypto currency without permission is due for a high profile court case.
I did that on some university servers around 1999. We had a few Alphas dedicated to batch processing, and I set up S@H to run on them.
One catch was that the duration of batch jobs was limited to 12 hours, so I couldn't just fire and forget. I ended up scripting it so that when the job ended, it automatically resubmitted itself to the batch queue.
It took about a day before I got a surprisingly friendly e-mail from the sysadmin asking me to please stop.
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#77Users don't want to pay, and they don't want ads. The scale has to tip eventually.
Thankfully there's an excellent repository full of free software with no ads.
F-Droid.org in case you've never heard of it.
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As for electricity, lousy developers steal it as well. What's the difference if the stealthy app does what it says and is reasonable about mining? I can think of at least two differences. First, the developer profits from one but not the other. Second, the developer intended one but not the other. We evaluate the morality of accidental waste differently from that of deliberate taking for personal gain.
> We evaluate the morality of accidental waste differently from that of deliberate taking for personal gain. On the other hand, if you look at this from another perspective, inefficient software wasting power means no one gains. If the same power was being used for mining, then someone gains. If I were forced to choose between these two alternatives, I would definitely pick the latter.
Intent matters.
And, all else being equal, if someone writes inefficient code and has bad intentions, it's even worse.
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electricity and bandwidth are both resources that most people have to pay for, I would consider this theft and not a "victimless crime". The severity of financial impact on the victim is irrelevant. If I steal tiny amounts of money ~0.01c from large amounts of people and accrued significant wealth from it, is it fine? Is it a "victimless crime" because the amount is so small?
A theft? Do you consider all installed apps to be stealing then?
If I make a mistake at doing my taxes and accidentally pay $1,000 less than I should is that the same as knowingly gaming the system so that I have to pay $1,000 less?
Is one of those considered stealing?
Re: Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, its theft. If I borrow your bicycle all the time without you knowing it may be innocent enough, but it still causes wear and tear on the bicycle. I am thieving bicycle time from you that you paid for. If I had simply asked for it, you couldn't blame me, but alas I took it without your consent. [edit] Do either of these apps explicitly state that they will access/use device in this way?
No it's not theft, it's conversion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(law)
That article is confusing.
Someone cuts down trees from land they don't own to haul them away for lumber? That's clear theft to me.
Removing furniture that you don't own from a cohabited dwelling and storing it without telling the owner the location? That's clear theft to me.
Someone finds lost goods that they then keep for themselves without attempting to return them to the rightful owner? I can see that being something other than theft.