Bitcoin Forum

I'm serious, who the hell decided it would be a good idea to embed hidden miners on every other bitcoin related web site?

You are causing visitors to leave your site and never return. Not to mention stealing their CPU power and electricity, or the increased risk of causing a fire, killing their cat & children.

Is this REALLY what BitCoin is about?

Can anything be done against this monstrosity?

Got proof?

Block sites that bother you. Easy fix.

http://www.bitbid.net for one.

Doesn't look like theres anything wrong to me.

I can confirm bitbid.net makes my CPU jump from 1% to 53%

Edit: It contains the following code:

chrome that bad boy and inspect it
http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/3329/newbitmapimagew.jpg

Ah, sorry. Only saw a 1% jump, probably because of noScript. Missed that in the source. :)

SAME here, i sit on the site my CPU jumps to 28% to 35+% usage

+1

I'm not very observant, but if I see ANY website sucking up my CPU without my consent, I will not be back for a second visit.

ditto, a google chrome worker, jumped up to 100% of one cpu when on that site. boo

And the world thought web miners were great. I actually got scoffed at the last time I voiced concern over the active development of CPU and WebCL web miners.

Still, can't see how it's ruining anyone's life... just don't visit that web site.

You're right, stealing resources is wrong.

I have adblockplus, so I added the filter

For now you can just block the script host, but as people start coding their own web miners, we'll be in for a real hassle...

use FF with "noscript" enabled

http://noscript.net/

There is no reason why a web site doing this is any worse than a web site doing anything else with JavaScript, Java, Flash, Silverlight, etc.  If your browser lets people run programs on your computer, they will.  If you don't like it, disable it with noscript, complain to your browser developer that they shouldn't allow unfettered scripts by untrusted web sites. 

One browser feature I'd like to see is allow untrusted web sites to run scripts for only a second or two per user interaction.  Video players would need to use HTML5 video or get permission from the user for long-running scripts.

Thank you, I have updated my filter and the resource vampire has been smitten. This could become a real problem...

It isn't stealing. If you go to a site with scripting enabled, then you are inviting that site to run scripts.

It is a bit of a dick move though.

Maybe we should compile a list of all of the known websites that are using this?

so....i don't like it either... but this seems a tad extreme.

y'know something/  this could be a future possibility - and handled correctly, i can't say that i'd mind.  i'd even contribute some CPU cycles.

i mean, who mines with their CPU?  it ain't costing you Bitcoin.

so think about this:  you go to a website, and you are presented with two checkboxes:

1.) click here if you would like to view this website with 16 blinking ads on every page - the advertisers pay us so we can continue to exist.

2.) click here if you would like to view this website without a single ad - but we will use a little bit of your CPU to generate the income we need to exist.

which box would you click?

The 'X' in the top-right-hand corner.

That's why my cat died...

#1 for sure.

Choice is good.

I am frequently out and about accessing websites on a netbook and doing my best to conserve power so that the battery lasts me until I get home. It gets very annoying when a web page goes into some javascript loop and the CPU fan starts spinning and I know my battery is being drained at a high rate. In this day and age many websites present dynamic content with ajax, xmlhttp and what not, so noscript is not a viable option (kind of like driving a car without heat or a/c). The right thing for website operators to do is to present the user a choice.

Sounds like you badly need NoScript.  More than most, in fact, with a netbook and limited battery capacity.


This is exactly why you need NoScript.  All that "dynamic content" is running scripts and draining your battery.  If you need it, fine, turn it on.  NoScript does not disable all scripts, only the ones you decide you don't want.


Does your A/C have an on-off switch?


Waiting for untrusted web site operators to do the right thing is going to be disappointing for you.

Going to sites with webmining on really kills my battery life, kicks on my fan and makes my laptop run hot.

it's not money laundering but those fags running that kind of websites are giving Bitcoin a bad name

That sounds a lot like the kind of BS arguments thieves come up with to rationalise their actions. "If you don't make it impossible to steal something then it's ok to do it".

and a JS miner brings nothing hahahah

I have removed the script from BitBid. I was trying out Bitp.it's javascript miner for the last week and I should have posted a disclaimer. I apologize.

Thanks for coming clean and doing the decent thing.

I honestly didn't think it would anger people this much. I got an email earlier from who I assume is the OP complaining about the CPU usage. It was the first message I have gotten bringing it up but I don't want to risk pissing any more people off so it is gone. Without your reputation you are nothing.

That email wasn't from me, but thank you for removing the miner from your website, hopefully more people do the same  :)

I hate client-side scripting in general: both Flash and EMCAscript. It takes control of the computer away from the user. There may be some benefit in doing client-side sanity checks or tabulation, but the server must ulimately do those checks anyway since the client is untrusted.

For distributed computing, scripting with an interpreted language is just about the most inefficient way to go about it. Browsers are not Operating systems. There is no way to make a script run at low priority when the CPU is idle. Even if you could do that, you don't know if your use of the client computer is CPU bound. If they are low on memory, your computing client may cause the browser to constantly page out to disk or even crash if swap files are disabled.

I actually don't mind the JavaApplet concept: they actually ask the use permission to do stuff like use the network or disk. The "powers that be" have decided it is a bad idea to confuse users with choice about how they use their computer.