Ads don't work so websites are using your electricity to pay the bills

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: September 28, 2017 at 6:48:51 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Ads don't work so websites are using your electricity to pay the bills
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Ads don't work so websites are using your electricity to pay the bills
> Pirate Bay and Showtime turned to forcing unknowing visitors to mine cryptocurrency, using computers rather than 
> eyeballs on ads to generate money
> By Alex Hern
> Sep 27 2017
> <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/pirate-bay-showtime-ads-websites-electricity-pay-bills-cryptocurrency-bitcoin>
>
> With the continuing collapse in online advertising revenues, websites are turning to other methods to pay their 
> hosting bills – including using visitors’ computers and phones to mine cryptocurrency.
>
> It’s a controversial practice, with some likening it to running malware on visitor’s computers, but it is a 
> potentially lucrative endeavour for websites. The downside is that at best it slows down visitors’ machines, and at 
> worst it can also drain their batteries or send their electricity bills soaring.
>
> BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay, and US video streaming service Showtime, are two sites that were discovered 
> to be sending mining code to users. The former owned up, posting in mid-September that the code was “just a test” and 
> that the experiment was being done with a view to removing all adverts from the site.
>
> The latter removed the code on Monday, shortly after a user noticed it and specialist press began reporting. But it 
> has yet to answer questions on why the code was there from the Guardian and other media organisations.
>
> Cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin and its successors, are backed by a system of “miners”, who race to be the first to 
> solve tricky computing problems in exchange for a reward for doing so. The rewards are large – the bitcoin network, 
> for instance, gives away coins worth $7m to miners every day – but to be in with a chance, miners need to gather an 
> extraordinarily large amount of computing power.
>
> Not only is it expensive to buy those computers, it also consumes a huge amount of electricity to run them. As a 
> result, the most profitable mining companies often have access to cheap energy, or some other efficiency boost - one 
> firm, based in Iceland, saves money by letting the country’s naturally cold climate cool its computers.
>
> Website-based mining short circuits that: the electricity bills are paid by the visitor, but it’s the website that 
> gets the reward. 
>
> “Gaming and video sites typically are more resource intensive, so it seems to make little sense to run a miner at the 
> same time without having a noted impact,” says Malwarebytes analyst Jérôme Segura. “Having said that, many people who 
> consume copyrighted content are perhaps less likely to complain about an under-par user experience. 
>
> “The question at this point is: how far can publishers push the limits towards a really bad user experience? You may 
> be surprised that for many, this is not really a problem at all and that double dipping is, in fact, a fairly common 
> practice,” he added.
>
> [snip]
>
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