Are Cryptocurrency Miners The Future for Pirate Sites?

[Ernesto]

Last weekend The Pirate Bay surprised friend and foe by adding a Javascript-based cryptocurrency miner to its website.

The miner utilizes CPU power from visitors to generate Monero coins for the site, providing an extra revenue source.

Initially, this caused the CPUs of visitors to max out due to a configuration error, but it was later adjusted to be less demanding. Still, there was plenty of discussion on the move, with greatly varying opinions.

Some criticized the site for “hijacking” their computer resources for personal profit, without prior warning. However, there are also people who are happy to give something back to TPB, especially if it can help the site to remain online.

Aside from the configuration error, there was another major mistake everyone agreed on. The Pirate Bay team should have alerted its visitors to this change beforehand, and not after the fact, as they did last weekend.

Despite the sensitivities, The Pirate Bay’s move has inspired others to follow suit. Pirate linking site Alluc.ee is one of the first. While they use the same mining service, their implementation is more elegant.

Alluc shows how many hashes are mined and the site allows users to increase or decrease the CPU load, or turn the miner off completely.

Alluc.ee miner

Putting all the controversy aside for a minute, the idea to let visitors mine coins is a pretty ingenious idea. The Pirate Bay said it was testing the feature to see if it’s possible as a replacement for ads, which might be much needed in the future.

In recent years many pirate sites have struggled to make a decent income. Not only are more people using ad-blockers now, the ad-quality is also dropping as copyright holders actively go after this revenue source, trying to dry up the funds of pirate sites. And with Chrome planning to add a default ad-blocker to its browser, the outlook is grim.

A cryptocurrency miner might alleviate this problem. That is, as long as ad-blockers don’t start to interfere with this revenue source as well.

Interestingly, this would also counter one of the main anti-piracy talking points. Increasingly, industry groups are using the “public safety” argument as a reason to go after pirate sites. They point to malicious advertisements as a great danger, hoping that this will further their calls for tougher legislation and enforcement.

If The Pirate Bay and other pirate sites can ditch the ads, they would be less susceptible to these and other anti-piracy pushes. Of course, copyright holders could still go after the miner revenues, but this might not be easy.

TorrentFreak spoke to Coinhive, the company that provides the mining service to The Pirate Bay, and they don’t seem eager to take action without a court order.

“We don’t track where users come from. We are just providing servers and a script to submit hashes for the Monero blockchain. We don’t see it as our responsibility to determine if a website is ‘valid’ and we don’t have the technical capabilities to do so,” a Coinhive representative says.

We also contacted several site owners and thus far the response has been mixed. Some like the idea and would consider adding a miner, if it doesn’t affect visitors too much. Others are more skeptical and don’t believe that the extra revenue is worth the trouble.

The Pirate Bay itself, meanwhile, has completed its test run and has removed the miner from the site. They will now analyze the results before deciding whether or not it’s “the future” for them.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.



Originally Published: Thu, 21 Sep 2017 18:50:57 +0000
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[contrail]

I would like to see the feature that alluc.ee added to TPB even if it is weekly, monthly or yearly. But can we make sure we tie the hashes to ip addresses instead of using cookies?

[connor17]

Demonoid is trying it too.

[contrail]

Once one starts all will copy. The people at coin-hive.com must be making quite a lot of money. Alluc has a goal that once reached gives you a reward, I think it is creative.

[Ernesto]

Earlier this month The Pirate Bay caused some uproar by adding a Javascript-based cryptocurrency miner to its website.

The miner utilizes CPU power from visitors to generate Monero coins for the site, providing an extra revenue source.

While Pirate Bay only tested the option briefly, it inspired many others to follow suit. Streaming related sites such as Alluc, Vidoza, and Rapidvideo jumped on board, and torrent site Demonoid also ran some tests.

During the weekend, Coinhive’s miner code even appeared on the official website of Showtime. The code was quickly removed and it’s still unclear how it got there, as the company refuses to comment. It’s clear, though, that miners are a hot topic thanks to The Pirate Bay.

The revenue potential is also real. TorrentFreak spoke to Vidoza who say that with 30,000 online users throughout the day (2M unique visitors), they can make between $500 and $600. That’s when the miner is throttled at 50%. Although ads can bring in more, it’s not insignificant.

That said, all the uproar about cryptocurrency miners and their possible abuse has also attracted the attention of ad-blockers. Some people have coded new browser add-ons to block miners specifically and the popular uBlock Origin added Coinhive to its default blocklist as well. And that’s just after a few days.

Needless to say, this limits the number of miners, and thus the money that comes in. And there’s another problem with a similar effect.

In addition to ad-blockers, anti-virus tools are also flagging Coinhive. Malwarebytes is one of the companies that lists it as a malicious activity, warning users about the threat.

The anti-virus angle is one of the issues that worries Demonoid’s operator. The site is used to ad-blockers, but getting flagged by anti-virus companies is of a different order.

“The problem I see there and the reason we will likely discontinue [use of the miner] is that some anti-virus programs block it, and that might get the site on their blacklists,” Deimos informs TorrentFreak.

Demonoid’s miner announcement

Vidoza operator Eugene sees all the blocking as an unwelcome development and hopes that Coinhive will tackle it. Coinhive may want to come out in public and start to discuss the issue with ad-blockers and anti-virus companies, he says.

“They should find out under what conditions all these guys will stop blocking the script,” he notes.

The other option would be to circumvent the blocking through proxies and circumvention tools, but that might not be the best choice in the long run.

Coinhive, meanwhile, has chimed in as well. The company says that it wasn’t properly prepared for the massive attention and understands why some ad-blockers have put them on the blacklist.

“Providing a real alternative to ads and users who block them turned out to be a much harder problem. Coinhive, too, is now blocked by many ad-block browser extensions, which – we have to admit – is reasonable at this point.”

Most complaints have been targeted at sites that implemented the miner without the user’s consent. Coinhive doesn’t like this either and will take steps to prevent it in future.

“We’re a bit saddened to see that some of our customers integrate Coinhive into their pages without disclosing to their users what’s going on, let alone asking for their permission,” the Coinhive team notes.

The crypto miner provider is working on a new implementation that requires explicit consent from website visitors in order to run. This should deal with most of the negative responses.

If users start mining voluntarily, then ad-blockers and anti-virus companies should no longer have a reason to block the script. Nor will it be easy for malware peddlers to abuse it.

To be continued.

Originally Published: Tue, 26 Sep 2017
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[contrail]

Let's hope the feds don't get involved and seize the money. It appears this company is in the US

[moonbyt3]

well why not? if it will support work of bay sure. but make it transparent like on coin hive. place a button to increase speed of mining and im assured there are great people who will run it on higher, so it could compensate the loss of adblockers. if u give trust u can expect it to return to you.

[contrail]

I think this kinda thing needs to be regulated by users trying to help the site with what small power they have on their CPU's. Transparency would be the best thing for the whole system. I think we gonna need transparency after this: https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-bans...rs-171004/ . Will TPB be able to run the miner if they announce or will Cloudflare be lost? I am assuming if they have the miner but don't use people's CPU's they are ok?!

[lidlnelly]

We think it's a good idea, in principal. How TPB rolled out the resource grabbing was a total cluster-fuck. Allowing it to run as a PID with an in/out option should have been implemented well before anything was acted upon.

It was taking a liberty with a big middle finger to most who understand the process. Collaboration with the community would have got a hugely positive response ioo. Waking up to a used condom between your cheeks is not going to win people around

[contrail]

Well there is kinda a big no no from Cloudflare. Pirate sites can't use the service if they have it which makes it's future shaky.