5 ms·

I don't much like the notion of farming out my "cryptomining blocker" to some unknown-to-me third party. There are a (small) number of sites that do cryptominin

I don't much like the notion of farming out my "cryptomining blocker" to some unknown-to-me third party. There are a (small) number of sites that do cryptomining after asking for an opt-in permission (e.g. bit.tube). It seems to me that this is an interesting exploration of new, alternate funding models than serving ads, and I, for one, like to (sometimes) support these. I'd hate to see them land up in a blocklist I don't have some degree of control over.

mcsmash 8y ago
This. The internet desperately needs to progress beyond an advertisement driven business model. Disallowing these scripts seems a little heavy handed. Perhaps the addition of a "requestComputeResources" method to the browser's api would give a way to throttle them instead of outright banning them.
- VWWHFSfQ 8y ago
  Nobody would use that API if they can just do it anyway without the users consent
- endorphone 8y ago
  They make it optional. To be real, though, somewhere close to 0% (rounded to the third decimal place) of users would agree to grossly inefficient cryptomining in the browser. As a web funding model it is terrible and is almost always akin to malware. It certainly costs the user much more in electricity costs than it will ever benefit web publishers.
  - bodyloss 8y ago
    And as a global ecological cost, it's pretty huge.
  - SilasX 8y ago
    >They make it optional. Mozilla? Optional protection? Don't trigger my memories. They also made it optional to block unsigned extensions, which you could turn off if you wanted to tweak one to fix a bug because it wasn't being maintained fast enough. Like, if you believed in the whole Open Source/tinkering philosophy, or something, which Mozilla may or may not care about. Then, they started disallowing it in 2016. And they turned off key remapping too.
- simias 8y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree that we need to progress beyond the ad-driven business model but is in-browser mining really a plausible replacement? For one thing it's probably not a good idea on battery-powered devices, so it's only useful for monetizing desktop browsing. It also means that the money you make out of it depends on the average power your "customer" has available to mine. Beyond that since mining is a zero-sum game it means that the more people opt for this model, the less money they individually make. Maybe today you make on average 0.001cent per minute and per user and a year from now you make a tenth of that. You have absolutely zero control on it since it's merely a factor of the total hashrate and the cryptocurrency's value. I have a hard time imagining how this could become mainstream. Tipping using cryptocurrency microtransaction seems more promising but even that is far from a solved problem. I'd rather directly send $.002 to the website rather than waste $.01 of electricity for the website to make $.001 out of it.
  - Avamander 8y ago
    The thing is that with ad networks you're at their mercy, if they don't want to sell ads on your site, you have no other option. While it would be nice to have a micropayment system built into browsers themselves, cryptomining is kind-of the best option.
- kevingadd 8y ago
  There's not really a way to detect that someone is cryptomining, they can just do it with regular JS or webgl (which has a compute focused API in the works). I don't think either of those features could ever be opt-in. Detecting mining in WebAssembly would be even harder.
mrspeaker 8y ago
I agree it sounds harsh, but I think for NOW it's the correct choice. Like any browser API that can be abused, the small number of valid sites are so overwhelmingly dwarfed by the dodgy ones. When I first heard about the "notifications" API I thought it was a great idea - so many valid use case! Now I want it to burn in a fire. Something with so few use cases as cryptomining should not be something that users blindly click yes to.
- eitland 8y ago
  Could we make Javascript optional as well while we're at it? "This site tries to run Javascript. Normal news sites shouldn't need this. [Allow this session] [Allow 5 seconds] [Deny]" I'd be particularily interested in the second option since it would allow us to use sites that depend on JS for content while they roll back the craziness that is depending on scripting to show static content. While I'm at it: I want badges! - Certified Javascript free page (Platinum) - Certified progressive site, no dependence on Javascript, no long running background scripts (Gold) - etc Obviously I'm exaggerating the implementations here but I'm serious about the idea. (And yes, I earn good money on frontend work, I just think it often makes solutions worse.)
  - mrspeaker 8y ago
    Ha ha, "certification" is a cool idea, but it would be hard to get anyone to care about it. "Allow 5 seconds" is a feature I really want now - I might dig into the Firefox code (or No-Script) and see if I can figure it out! I have no-script on by default, and these days I need be convinced there's a REALLY good reason to temporarily whitelist a site. Sure, a lot of the web is now either a blank page (or "you need to enable js to run this app") but on the positive side, I'm a lot more productive as I just close those sites and move on!
    - gpm 8y ago
      I've wanted the "allow 5 seconds" thing for a long time too. You can manually pause and resume js by opening up the debugger and hitting pause. The code exists it just needs to be exposed to the UI.

mcsmash 8y ago

This. The internet desperately needs to progress beyond an advertisement driven business model. Disallowing these scripts seems a little heavy handed. Perhaps the addition of a "requestComputeResources" method to the browser's api would give a way to throttle them instead of outright banning them.

VWWHFSfQ 8y ago
Nobody would use that API if they can just do it anyway without the users consent
endorphone 8y ago
They make it optional. To be real, though, somewhere close to 0% (rounded to the third decimal place) of users would agree to grossly inefficient cryptomining in the browser. As a web funding model it is terrible and is almost always akin to malware. It certainly costs the user much more in electricity costs than it will ever benefit web publishers.
- bodyloss 8y ago
  And as a global ecological cost, it's pretty huge.
- SilasX 8y ago
  >They make it optional. Mozilla? Optional protection? Don't trigger my memories. They also made it optional to block unsigned extensions, which you could turn off if you wanted to tweak one to fix a bug because it wasn't being maintained fast enough. Like, if you believed in the whole Open Source/tinkering philosophy, or something, which Mozilla may or may not care about. Then, they started disallowing it in 2016. And they turned off key remapping too.
simias 8y ago
I wholeheartedly agree that we need to progress beyond the ad-driven business model but is in-browser mining really a plausible replacement? For one thing it's probably not a good idea on battery-powered devices, so it's only useful for monetizing desktop browsing. It also means that the money you make out of it depends on the average power your "customer" has available to mine. Beyond that since mining is a zero-sum game it means that the more people opt for this model, the less money they individually make. Maybe today you make on average 0.001cent per minute and per user and a year from now you make a tenth of that. You have absolutely zero control on it since it's merely a factor of the total hashrate and the cryptocurrency's value. I have a hard time imagining how this could become mainstream. Tipping using cryptocurrency microtransaction seems more promising but even that is far from a solved problem. I'd rather directly send $.002 to the website rather than waste $.01 of electricity for the website to make $.001 out of it.
- Avamander 8y ago
  The thing is that with ad networks you're at their mercy, if they don't want to sell ads on your site, you have no other option. While it would be nice to have a micropayment system built into browsers themselves, cryptomining is kind-of the best option.
kevingadd 8y ago
There's not really a way to detect that someone is cryptomining, they can just do it with regular JS or webgl (which has a compute focused API in the works). I don't think either of those features could ever be opt-in. Detecting mining in WebAssembly would be even harder.

mrspeaker 8y ago

I agree it sounds harsh, but I think for NOW it's the correct choice. Like any browser API that can be abused, the small number of valid sites are so overwhelmingly dwarfed by the dodgy ones. When I first heard about the "notifications" API I thought it was a great idea - so many valid use case! Now I want it to burn in a fire. Something with so few use cases as cryptomining should not be something that users blindly click yes to.

eitland 8y ago
Could we make Javascript optional as well while we're at it? "This site tries to run Javascript. Normal news sites shouldn't need this. [Allow this session] [Allow 5 seconds] [Deny]" I'd be particularily interested in the second option since it would allow us to use sites that depend on JS for content while they roll back the craziness that is depending on scripting to show static content. While I'm at it: I want badges! - Certified Javascript free page (Platinum) - Certified progressive site, no dependence on Javascript, no long running background scripts (Gold) - etc Obviously I'm exaggerating the implementations here but I'm serious about the idea. (And yes, I earn good money on frontend work, I just think it often makes solutions worse.)
- mrspeaker 8y ago
  Ha ha, "certification" is a cool idea, but it would be hard to get anyone to care about it. "Allow 5 seconds" is a feature I really want now - I might dig into the Firefox code (or No-Script) and see if I can figure it out! I have no-script on by default, and these days I need be convinced there's a REALLY good reason to temporarily whitelist a site. Sure, a lot of the web is now either a blank page (or "you need to enable js to run this app") but on the positive side, I'm a lot more productive as I just close those sites and move on!
  - gpm 8y ago
    I've wanted the "allow 5 seconds" thing for a long time too. You can manually pause and resume js by opening up the debugger and hitting pause. The code exists it just needs to be exposed to the UI.