12 ms·

The crapware in question is a bitcoin miner.

wodenokoto 12y ago
My point was, why does the headline say "offer" when it is not offered but silently installed. Sorry for the poor articulation.
- DonHopkins 12y ago
  Oh sure, it's an offer -- you just can't refuse it.
  - wernercd 12y ago
    No... you can. The problem is they use reverse psyc, hidden triggers, double negatives, etc. For example, I can't remember if it was Downloads.com or SourceForge, I recently almost installed Vosteran because the option to deselect the "extra awesomeness" was hidden in "Advanced Install" section and I had clicked on "Normal Install". I've also seen plenty of "Accept Offer" with "Decline Offer" next to it, greyed out like it was disabled. Plenty of examples exist of them TECHNICALLY giving you an opt-out - but hiding that opt out in every way imaginable.
comboy 12y ago
I doubt it's a bitcoin miner. Probably some altcoin. Bitcoin mining is not profitable on CPU anymore, no matter how many general purpose CPUs you have at your disposal (fair approximation).
- leni536 12y ago
  It's profitable if you use other people's computers and don't pay for the wasted electricity. It's straight stealing though.
  - shawabawa3 12y ago
    Depends on what you mean by profitable For a modern top of the range CPU you can expect maybe ~5MH/s (likely even less) If 1 million people install utorrent and have their processors mining constantly, you can expect a daily profit of about $14
    - jonknee 12y ago
      As far as I know uTorrent has hundreds of millions of users, it's not going to be amazingly profitable, but still significant revenue. (I don't see any recent figures, but they were at 150m monthly users over three years ago.)
- mikeash 12y ago
  It could be a Bitcoin miner put in by people who don't understand how worthless that would be.
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    See: How people have found miners running on compromised NAS boxes and even DVRs.
- alvarosm 12y ago
  yeah, Litecoin actually

My point was, why does the headline say "offer" when it is not offered but silently installed. Sorry for the poor articulation.

DonHopkins 12y ago
Oh sure, it's an offer -- you just can't refuse it.
- wernercd 12y ago
  No... you can. The problem is they use reverse psyc, hidden triggers, double negatives, etc. For example, I can't remember if it was Downloads.com or SourceForge, I recently almost installed Vosteran because the option to deselect the "extra awesomeness" was hidden in "Advanced Install" section and I had clicked on "Normal Install". I've also seen plenty of "Accept Offer" with "Decline Offer" next to it, greyed out like it was disabled. Plenty of examples exist of them TECHNICALLY giving you an opt-out - but hiding that opt out in every way imaginable.

comboy 12y ago

I doubt it's a bitcoin miner. Probably some altcoin. Bitcoin mining is not profitable on CPU anymore, no matter how many general purpose CPUs you have at your disposal (fair approximation).

leni536 12y ago
It's profitable if you use other people's computers and don't pay for the wasted electricity. It's straight stealing though.
- shawabawa3 12y ago
  Depends on what you mean by profitable For a modern top of the range CPU you can expect maybe ~5MH/s (likely even less) If 1 million people install utorrent and have their processors mining constantly, you can expect a daily profit of about $14
  - jonknee 12y ago
    As far as I know uTorrent has hundreds of millions of users, it's not going to be amazingly profitable, but still significant revenue. (I don't see any recent figures, but they were at 150m monthly users over three years ago.)
mikeash 12y ago
It could be a Bitcoin miner put in by people who don't understand how worthless that would be.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  See: How people have found miners running on compromised NAS boxes and even DVRs.
alvarosm 12y ago
yeah, Litecoin actually