4 ms·

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

• ErrantX 9y ago
  Seems wasteful & fruitless. Better to evolve a micropayments model that works (because at least i can quantify what I pay)
  • wklauss 9y ago
    > because at least i can quantify what I pay And the publishers can quantify how much it gets. With the volatility of crypto assets this is not a viable solution for the publisher, especially because readers who have an ad-blocker installed are likely to block the mining script as well. This is a publicity stunt. Nothing more, nothing less.
    • applecrazy 9y ago
      If so, this is a stupid publicity stunt, given the largely negative reaction by this community and the media. If anything, more people will install adblockers because of things like this.
  • Kiro 9y ago
    > Better to evolve a micropayments model that works 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.
  • darawk 9y ago
    I'm sure as soon as that micro-payments model evolves Salon will be happy to switch to it. People have been saying that for 20 years, though, and this is the closest we've come.
  • TekMol 9y ago
    Better to evolve a micropayments model that works Only problem with that is that the web is decades old now and so far nobody managed to do that.
  • pishpash 9y ago
    Micropayment is the way to go. There needs to be a two-sided market. Free isn't the market clearing price and whatever the content producer wants to charge also isn't.
  • krylon 9y ago
    In principle, yes, PLEASE!!! In practice, people have been wishing for a well-functioning micropayment system for well over twenty years and the best we have to show for it is PayPal. Flattr seemed like a good idea, mostly, but for some reason it tanked, too (AFAIK). Either people are not interested in creating one that works, or the problem is really, really hard.
    • ric2b 9y ago
      I think the problem is simply hard. Micro-payments imply more infrastructure costs (more transactions) but lower revenue (because the payment itself is tiny, so the fee has to be tiny as well). But look at Bitcoin's Lightning Network, it may very well become a valid micro-payment system. As far as I know it's biggest scaling roadblock is getting efficient routing.
• abusoufiyan 9y ago
  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.
  • sudhirj 9y ago
    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.
    • abusoufiyan 9y ago
      But the software is clearly a hot avenue for hackers. And trying to legitimize this kind of thing also makes the foray into "cryptojacking" more enticing. 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/cryptocurrency-mining-coinhive-browsealoud-hack-thousands-of-sites-catastrophe 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.
      • sudhirj 9y ago
        CoinHive has assumed that all instances of sites directly using the CoinHive software have been or are going to be blocked, and so have deprecated direct use of the CoinHive JS. Authedmine.com is now the official way to do things, and it operates only with consent.
        • abusoufiyan 9y ago
• MereInterest 9y ago
  Absolutely not. Wasting battery power to let somebody else buy into a pyramid scheme is not my idea of a solution.
  • sudhirj 9y ago
    It's a perfectly reasonable solution for those who are okay with it. You need to pay with something - either with your privacy, your attention, your money, or your electricity/idle CPU cycles. Ad blockers eliminate paying with attention, and put a big squeeze on paying with privacy. Which makes the leftover choices of money or power quite reasonable. What site uses the money or power for is nobody's business. Would you not pay journalists if you found out they like losing money on pyramid schemes?
    • abusoufiyan 9y ago
      It's not though because the effects on the rest of the web are negative. Cryptojacking will become more common the more legit websites use it as a source of revenue. And this specific company / team of developers have been doing very little to stop the malicious use of their javascript. Why support them? EDIT: By "why support them" I obviously mean, why should a publisher support a team with such wanton disregard for security of the net that they depend on to publish their stuff. I won't read the articles. But their decision to use such a thing isn't a good one and I can criticize it.
      • sudhirj 9y ago
        Because adblockers can (and do) block all scripts and sites that mine without consent. Specific legal and consent-only domains will need to be whitelisted, which is what CoinHive is trying to with authedmine.com
        • abusoufiyan 9y ago
          So people who don't run adblockers should just suck it up and get gut-punched because CoinHive doesn't want to lose money? CoinHive has the ability to just not pay out any versions of the software which aren't authmine. Again, what a bad look to partner with such a crap team of people. There are surely other providers of the exact same service.
• bencollier49 9y ago
  I've said this elsewhere - this is a terrible thing, it's an environmental catastrophe.