[2017-09-18] The Pirate Bay is Pirating Your Processor for Bitcoin Mining

[moriskarlov]

It has come to light that well-known illegal piracy site, The Pirate Bay has been “borrowing” its visitors CPU processing power in order to mine digital currencies as a source of revenue.

Exposed by Torrentfreak, it seems that the illegal torrent site has been secretly testing a Javascript Cryptocurrency miner on their page that allocates a large chunk of the visitor’s processing power to their mining operation.

Unhappy pirates

While The Pirate Bay is a well-known site, it’s one that clearly struggles with a revenue stream in the classical manner. Advertising and ad placement on the site is largely unavailable due to the nature of the content and as such, it seems as if the administrators of the site went looking elsewhere.

Mining cryptocurrency seemed to be their prefered choice, but this isn’t sitting well with users of the site, who were caught unaware by the sudden spike in their CPU’s usage while visiting.

“That really is serious, so hopefully we can get some action on it quickly. And perhaps get some attention for the uploading and commenting bugs while they’re at it,” a Pirate Bay user named “Sid” wrote in a comment, according to Torrentfreak.

Simply a test

According to The Pirate Bay, who responded to Torrentfreak, this was a test, and it was only to be performed for 24 hours.

Despite what The Pirate Bay says, they still have a few questions to answer, and furthermore, they raised a few philosophical questions about the regulation of mining.

Cryptocurrencies, as well as newly formed ones in the form of ICOs, have recently come under huge scrutiny, as places like China have upped their regulation, even inflicting bans.

This exploitation of users and their CPU power seems to be ethically wrong - even if it is done by a pirate website. Thus, should there be certain policies to restrict who can mine crypto, or should they subject erring users to penalties?

If the use of cryptocurrencies are being regulated, should the mining of said coins not also have some sort of laws and rules around them?

A balance must be struck, otherwise people are left unprotected and exposed to potentially exploitative methods — like those who “borrow” your CPU to earn a few virtual coins.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-pirate-bay-is-pirating-your-processor-for-bitcoin-mining

[yugyug]

This hacking practice for mining bitcoin partialy using your personal computer is not new. There are some report that some malware using exploit to attack your PC for mining purposes. Torrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing and it is very clear that it is possible to inject code or script to every downloaded files that saves on your PC, once the torrent launched the mining exploit also executed.

[Carlton Banks]

WTF

How stupid are the Cointelegraph writers?


HELLO? Piratebay are already operating on a questionable legal basis, laws regulating mining are going to make precisely zero difference



And this is all without going into the more important point; cryptocurrency mining is intended to be permissionless, it's a very important part of imbuing Bitcoin with permissionless transacting, and HENCE A VERY IMPORTANT PART OF WHAT MAKES BITCOIN VALUABLE AS A CURRENCY TO BEGIN WITH.


Cointelegraph.com; you're off to see the wizard, desperately in search of just one brain that will allow you to provide cryptocurrency journalism with meaningful or intelligent reporting. You may as well employ regular news journalists with no knowledge of this subject if this is what you have to offer.

[Kprawn]

Ok, so who will be the first person to take them to court over this?   .... Imagine this, you file a complaint with the Police

and they arrest you for Copyright infringement. Nobody is going to protect you, when you visit these sites, you are on your

own. When you visit sites like this you know it is illegal to distribute the copyrighted files... and then you want to complain

that these people are exploiting you in the process without your consent? You have nothing to stand on... you are going to

lose more than a some CPU processing power. {fines or jail time}  

[RodeoX]

A system like this may have a future. It's a reasonable alternative to ad revenue, assuming a site is up-front about it. There are other tests like this underway. Look at Brave browser's opt-out with bitcoin option.

https://www.brave.com/