Opera 50 Web Browser Will Offer Anti-Bitcoin Cryptocurrency Mining Feature (betanews.com) 76
BrianFagioli writes: The upcoming version 50 of the Opera web browser will offer an integrated anti-Bitcoin mining feature. Besides Bitcoin, it will also block the mining of other cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin and Ethereum. If you aren't aware, some websites are hijacking user computers to mine for cryptocurrencies. This is not only a potential violation of trust, but it can negatively impact the computer's performance too. Mining is also a huge waste of electricity. Opera 50 will offer an optional setting that, when enabled, blocks this nonsense.
All well and good (Score:3)
Re:All well and good (Score:5, Interesting)
But it still has to be able to detect that the code is even there.
It's just a block list. Specifically, this block list [github.com]. You can make use of the NoCoin block list in, for example, uBlock Origin.
Opera isn't doing anything particularly special here and it's a shame that they don't give the block list author any credit in the blog post (though they do in the comment section and in opera://about/credits in Opera 50 beta itself).
Re: (Score:2)
On Firefox, I installed NoMiner - Block Coin Miners.
Why? You could just use uBlock Origin with the NoCoin block list. What does NoMiner do for you that uBlock Origin doesn't?
Re: All well and good (Score:1)
Maybe they can detect continous high cpu usage.
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Great idea, that should also take care of some of the more obnoxious Javascript atrocities.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Best way to do that is to disable the bloody thing by default.
Sucking down as much scripted content from dubious sources and running it on your computer automatically is... not smart.
At all.
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Even if it could perhaps be disabled, it will likely be impossible to remove all traces of its code from one's system.
WebAssembly runs on the JavaScript VM in your browser just like JavaScript does now. You don't need to "remove all traces of its code" from your system, just clear your browse cache and any cached copies are gone. If you don't want to run WebAssembly (or JavaScript) then just use an extension like NoScript [mozilla.org] or uMatrix [mozilla.org] to block it.
Re: All well and good (Score:1)
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not all currencies use ASIC machines
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Hmm, can a turing-complete language calculate SHA1 hashes? Inquiring minds want to know.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
That's only because you are paying for the time nd the energy
if the energy is paid for by others and the time is parallel over a large enough group of systems, then the efficiency doesn't matter for the person doing the mining.
Re:Javascript? (Score:5, Insightful)
It needn't be practical. It's the spam problem: If the cost is zero, a nonzero profit, no matter how small, is reason enough to do it.
Re: Brainfuck (Score:1)
Brainfuck should become the standard web-scripting language enforced by W3C all browser devs. We'd have the old good HTML web back, and web-developers pursuing careers in selling snake oil.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would the miner care whether your computer burns 1000x the energy required to mine his coins as long as you pay for the electricity?
I've got a 3ghz CPU with many, many cores (Score:1)
I'll take a JS miner over shady ad networks every day of the week.
Re: I've got a 3ghz CPU with many, many cores (Score:2, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the end result will be that you'll get both.
Don't care (Score:3)
I'd prefer they'd mine bitcoin in the background any day over any ads or a gazillion trackers that follow me around.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd prefer they'd mine bitcoin in the background any day over any ads or a gazillion trackers
Why not both? Seriously, webdevs don’t see an either-or here but a both-and situation. So should you: block all of it.
Re: Don't care (Score:2)
Yeah.. That's the choice we are given.
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I prefer ads. Mostly 'cause I got the blocker for them already in place.
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Well, with ads you instantly notice when your blocker is shit. With miners ... not so much.
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Only 19? Someone doesn't know how to leverage a real motherboard. I can pop 36 in a triple-crossfire mobo using a 16x breakout down to individual 1x slots, then get the riser adapters. 1200W PSUs are the run of the mill cheap server PSUs, you want 2400W PSUs for any real power draw.
Sounds like you and your affiliate asshole friend need to go back to school and learn how to do real hardware builds.
Hijacking? That's rich! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing about this is hijacking. Hijacking implies it's an unauthorized takeover when the fact is that it's simply Javascript is doing exactly what it was created to do: execute arbitrary instructions from a remote source. The only thing different is that this is annoying people enough that it threatens all the jerks that demand to execute Javascript.
Here's an idea: add basic animation and ad hoc relative source loading for CSS then completely do away with Javascript. Oh but the money people don't give a shit about what users want, it's all about what they want.
Be real, this is just the logical conclusion of Javascript.
Not of Javascript: (Score:1)
Of emscripten/asm.js
Anyone who thought it was a smart idea and convenient to use didn't understand the full perils of it, perils that those of us from the 90s remembered all too well from the plugins of that era (some of which remained until very recently, or even today, but haven't been actively used by anyone with an inkling of sense in going on 20 years.)
By making the scripting engine of a web browser provide features equivalent to a computer or operating system you are essentially allowing the exact sam
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There is nothing asm.js and emscripen do not that you regular JS can't do. asm.js is just a subset of JS that is particularly well optimized and emscripen is just a code translator.
Safety features built into Javascript like sandboxing and safe memory management stay intact. Malware designed to run natively won't work in a Javascript VM no matter how much emscripen and asm.js you use.
And of course malware is software, so tools that help software developers help malware developers, and also anti-malware devel
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The money people want you to run and download only their certified (and rented) stuff. Running shared code is nothing new.
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CSS has very basic animation... but you might mean more than that.
Anti-Bitcoin Cryptocurrency Mining (Score:3)
Easy Poll (Score:1)
Would you rather have ads in your content or cryptocoin miners running in the background?
Assuming content costs money, both seem ways of making money on pages with content.
That said, it might make sense to limit the amount of the CPU that the browser can use; if we're designing webpages that need >1ghz octo-core processors, we're already doing something probably pretty wrong.
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Would you rather have ads in your content or cryptocoin miners running in the background?
False dichotomy.
The answer is "neither". I had neither yesterday. I have neither today. I will have neither tomorrow.
Already have this feature (Score:2)
Another angle (Score:5, Interesting)
How difficult would it be to limit how much CPU the browser has access to ?
Restricted to minimal CPU by default, allows you to whitelist sites that you trust.
Plausible ? Better way ?
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Perhaps, but Flash was blamed for "outrageous CPU usage" for years, yet HTML'ified video pegs the CPU as bad or worse than Flash in its heyday.
Anti-Bitcoin value (Score:2)
What's the current value of anti-bitcoin anyway? I can't seem to find it anywhere. I've been looking into investing in cryptocurrency other than bitcoin and, with Opera practically endorsing this one, I'm even more interested. It must be really easy to mine right now though if Opera is making a feature for users to mine from the browser.