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Blocking cryptominers from Firefox
- bastawhiz 7y agoSomewhat related question: do web-based cryptomining scripts produce a meaningful profit for website operators? Or is this the sort of thing where the person inserting the script is making only a few dollars, but it's so easy to deploy that there's relatively little downside for them?
- Operyl 7y agoDepends on the currency and the size of the site you’ve managed to compromise. It was a bigger thing when coinhive first launched, I feel.
- popotamonga 7y agoa single site with 1k users month used to make me 30€/m. 2 yrs ago.
- disqard 7y agoI'm curious: did you inform your website users that, by visiting your site, they were running a bitcoin miner?
- pojzon 7y agoOfcourse not.. it would be 10 users per month if he did. People dont like to be used even when notified.
- bartread 7y agoI'm curious: how do you think this differs from running ads?
- anilakar 7y agoAny responsible adult who knows the collective environmental effects of cryptomining will refuse to take any part in it, regardless how small they are for running a miner script for thirty seconds or so.
- Kiro 7y agoBe careful with the accusations. I've run cryptominers as well and I always prompt the users since they get a website reward for doing so. Think getting Reddit Gold for mining X minutes.
- brianpgordon 7y agoThe desktop version of The Pirate Bay runs a Monero miner, and tells you so on the homepage. They seem to still be pretty popular.
- Causality1 7y agoCryptominers are one of the many reasons I run NoScript with a whitelist.
- lacampbell 7y agoWhy do we treat advertisements and crypto-mining so differently? They both waste your machines resources, without specific opt in, to generate a profit. Unauthorized cryptominers are scripts ... that run energy-sucking operations on your web browser without your knowledge or consent. They literally steal your system’s computing power to make money. We think that’s deeply shady... What then, are advertisements?
- jarcane 7y agoSeriously. And why isn’t the mining blocked on by default? Most users aren’t going to know to even look for it, and I highly doubt any of them would support what’s basically theft of their resources.
- Sendotsh 7y agoI just checked and the "Cryptominers" box is ticked under "Privacy & Security > Content Blocking" for me, and I didn't turn it on. I have Firefox auto updating, so not sure if it's the same on a fresh install.
- vidyesh 7y agoAdvertisements eat resources while loading and once that is done they do not keep refreshing themselves to eat more resources. Cryptominers have a very different behavior. They reserve a % of system resources to keep running in the background as long as the site is kept open even in a dormant tab. So if your system is at 10% load usually, cryptominers could keep them at 20-30%+ load all the time they are in memory without the user knowing it nor approving it. Unlike advertisements we do not see them running or loaded in front of our eyes either. Don't you think this is very invasive?
- Beldin 7y agoAdvertisements eat resources while loading and once that is done they do not keep refreshing themselves to eat more resources. That is no longer true - on several sites (eg. Ars Technica), ads are loaded and refreshed after a short period. I haven't yet seen anything close to as resource-intensive as a cryptominer yet... in terms of CPU. In terms of bandwidth, I would not be surprised if most ads consume more than cryptominers.
- runn1ng 7y agoWell I was thinking, what smart algorithm are they using to detect that? Some ML? It turns out it’s just a third party domain ban list.
- Destiner 7y agoThat's how 95% of ad and tracker blockers work.
- tootahe45 7y agoCryptominers for the browser are basically non-existent because of how ineffective they are at making money.Should probably focus on something more useful than adding a few sites to the block list and making it out to be a big deal..
- szhu 7y agoIs it just me, or do Firefox's ad campaigns lean slightly on the fearmongering side? When computers run slowly, there are a few likely reasons why -- none of which involve cryptomining. When I've fixed my friends' computers for "slowness", I have never found the culprit to be cryptomining -- it's almost always because they have a lot of apps and tabs open. (I've typically solved the problem by showing them how to quit apps and by installing the OneTab and Great Suspender extensions, which, in short, remember the URLs of the open tabs while discarding their page contents.) It's true that sometimes, particular tabs are causing the slowness, but it's almost always just multiple Facebook/YouTube/Google Docs tabs rather than a random site with cryptomining. On the other hand, the linked blog post makes it seem like cryptomining is by far the main reason why users' computers are slow. Sure, it doesn't directly say that Firefox is the only way to solve slowness, but the strong implication is that slowness is necessarily caused by cryptomining. Since Firefox is the only major browser that blocks cryptomining natively, well, then Firefox becomes the obvious choice. I'm displeased that Mozilla leaves out any way for the reader to know whether their slowness is caused by cryptomining (bc it probably isn't). It seems weird for an organization that fights for freedoms to use strategies like this.
- theamk 7y agoYou sure about that? One of the problems with cryptominers is they make your machine slow when there are lots of tabs open. Great Suspender works great against cryptomineers.
- jakeogh 7y agoWould be nice to -STOP and -CONT as tabs are switched. It's per-process now isnt it?
- floatingatoll 7y agoWhile not to the degree of “immediate total halt” when backgrounders, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Page_Visibility_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Page_Visibi... may be of interest for understanding what kind of background throttling may be in place for all tabs.