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Thinking about this, how long till ad blockers will also block these crypto mining scripts... it's not that different.
Prime example of failed business models and their desperate attempts to survive. I'm really disappointed about how online publishers handle the decline of ad revenue. Of course my ad-blocker will also block your miner script, what do you think how this works? And better yet, integrating external third-party JavaScript into your website screams for abuse by attackers. Someone could just change the wallet address the s…
Businesses do not survive by default. It takes a lot of work and experimentation to find the right mix of everything to build a viable company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CoinHive provides two miners: one which runs without asking the user, and one which requires explicit consent from the user. The version requiring explicit consent is being used on the Salon website, and isn't currently being blocked by AdBlockers/malware detectors.
It is being blocked as some other commenters showed. I think the company needs to shut down shop and provide their explicit consent miner under a different name because as long as anyone looking up your company's name can only ever find articles about your company providing malware, you won't be very successful.
Isn't that a good thing? Imagine you have a little widget in your browser that displays something like '50%' which means you constantly use 50% of one core to mine a cryptocurrency for the page you are currently looking at. And in return you get an ad free web. I think that would be way better then the web as we know it.
Seems wasteful & fruitless. Better to evolve a micropayments model that works (because at least i can quantify what I pay)
I agree but until that exists this is the best thing we have. It's the only way you can pay cents without doing anything else than click a button.
Their website was already unreadable on mobile so I guess they're now going to make sure you can't view it on a desktop/laptop by pegging your cpu to 100%
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In theory yes, but in practice this software is a well-known malware. Not a good idea for any respctable site to be using it.
That's really disingenuous. The software does exactly what it says on the cover and the documentation, no more and no less. And it causes no harm of any sort, but uses lots of power as designed. The malware classification comes because some sites used it without user's permission, which CoinHive fixed via the authedmine.com domain - that only allows the miner to be use with explicit and temporary user consent.
If legit sites start doing this, users will get used to it and hackers will bring in more cash.
CoinHive didn't fix this, as far as I understand. They simply published an alternative miner. As recently as a week ago, many UK and US gov sites were cryptojacked using the CoinHive software: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj5m4v/cryptocurr...
They don't even seem to be trying to root out malicious users:
>The team don’t specifically track domains, so if a user’s email address is not, for example, “contact@website.com,” Coinhive often don’t know where or how the service is being used, though.
Isn't that a good thing? Imagine you have a little widget in your browser that displays something like '50%' which means you constantly use 50% of one core to mine a cryptocurrency for the page you are currently looking at. And in return you get an ad free web. I think that would be way better then the web as we know it.
Absolutely not. Wasting battery power to let somebody else buy into a pyramid scheme is not my idea of a solution.
Isn't that a good thing? Imagine you have a little widget in your browser that displays something like '50%' which means you constantly use 50% of one core to mine a cryptocurrency for the page you are currently looking at. And in return you get an ad free web. I think that would be way better then the web as we know it.
Seems wasteful & fruitless. Better to evolve a micropayments model that works (because at least i can quantify what I pay)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would they care? They make money off of the ads, if you use an ad blocker, you just run up their server costs. Don't think they care.
Because your site showing up in other news outlets under a title like "Salon Magazine running cryptojacking malware on users" is terrible publicity. I get that they are using the version which asks for consent, but why even take the risk of associating yourself with such a shady piece of software? If you make money of ads, you'd think you wouldn't want to do things that might scare away your users.