SafeBrowse Chrome Browser Plugin Uses Your PC for Cryptomining

Someone mentioned to me yesterday that we should run a cryptocurrency miner on HardOCP readers machines, with their full permission of course, in order to generate revenue. But when you are running a CoinHive miner on someone's box fully without their knowledge, that is a bit across the line in my opinion. The SafeBrowse Chrome Browser extension is doing just that. Seems like it may not be so safe after all, and this extension has 140,000 downloads, not exactly a tiny sampling. What if we set up HoverHound to do something like this? I think folks would none too happy about it. Of course now you can get an extension that will block coin miners as well so those bastards don't sneek up on you. I would suggest that most [H]'ers would be a bit alerted to seeing their CPUs running at 70%+ for "no reason" however.

Now it is the first Google Chrome extension that mines crypto currency while the extension is installed, and it seems likely that it won't be the only one that will make use of such an option.

/Golfclap

Way to go Chrome.

Fucking bloatware

Also typo in thread title.

Expecting this more and more...Personally i avoid using extensions as much as possible just out of principal of why doesn't my browser do this by design if it's important.

"Someone mentioned to me yesterday that we should run a cryptocurrency miner on HardOCP readers machines, with their full permission of course, in order to generate revenue."

I would be perfectly fine with this as opt-in.


Sneaky forced mining though...buhbye [H]!

The page for this seems to be gone, error 404... Wonder if Google took it down?

As an avid blocker of ads, I would also support the option of installing a mining extension in my browser to run while I'm on the site, as long as it doesn't slow down my browser. Even though I have reason to trust most of the sites I visit, I won't enable ads because of the possibility of malware being served, through no fault of the site itself.

Nice, while their eyeballs are making you money, make their machine make you money. That's capitalism baby!

gxp500 said:

Interesting idea, but i have a feeling admin's will go a bit bonkers with this and start adding boobs so people stay longer on the site... of course i don't mind.

Click to expand...

Just about everyone (even some that have them!) likes titties!

I know i certainly do.

If the miner running is only getting about maximum 20-30% of my cpu on a single thread, I would glady go with that rather than a bunch of adds, no need to opt me in or something, but a disclaimer at the bottom of the site would be good

Let's see if this works.
A porn site I regularly visit puts a steady 30% cpu load while idle.

edit: the plugin actually works. Firefox is getting phantom cpu load, and chrome isn't. As suspected, fucking porn site now adds bitmining to all the popups.