Imagine you have a little widget in your browser that displays something like '50%' which means you constantly use 50% of one core to mine a cryptocurrency for the page you are currently looking at.
And in return you get an ad free web. I think that would be way better then the web as we know it.
Ad blockers eliminate paying with attention, and put a big squeeze on paying with privacy. Which makes the leftover choices of money or power quite reasonable.
What site uses the money or power for is nobody's business. Would you not pay journalists if you found out they like losing money on pyramid schemes?
Cryptojacking will become more common the more legit websites use it as a source of revenue. And this specific company / team of developers have been doing very little to stop the malicious use of their javascript. Why support them?
EDIT: By "why support them" I obviously mean, why should a publisher support a team with such wanton disregard for security of the net that they depend on to publish their stuff. I won't read the articles. But their decision to use such a thing isn't a good one and I can criticize it.
If you object, then by all means, don't support them.
The appropriate way to do that is to not read the article. There's no mining if you don't visit.
A coin being mined is controlled, handled entirely by first party, provides no incentive for tracking, etc.
This seems like a huge win.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/02/13/salon-mines-...
Yeah, also a haven for hackers and malicious actors...
EDIT: I guess you weren't aware. CoinHive doesn't track the users who sign up for the service. It doesn't collect any information except email address. So malicious actors can easily sign up for the service and deliver the javascript through an XSS vulnerability for example. I thought that's what you meant by "no incentive for tracking".
Better to evolve a micropayments model that works (because at least i can quantify what I pay)
And the publishers can quantify how much it gets.
With the volatility of crypto assets this is not a viable solution for the publisher, especially because readers who have an ad-blocker installed are likely to block the mining script as well.
This is a publicity stunt. Nothing more, nothing less.
In practice, people have been wishing for a well-functioning micropayment system for well over twenty years and the best we have to show for it is PayPal. Flattr seemed like a good idea, mostly, but for some reason it tanked, too (AFAIK).
Either people are not interested in creating one that works, or the problem is really, really hard.
But look at Bitcoin's Lightning Network, it may very well become a valid micro-payment system. As far as I know it's biggest scaling roadblock is getting efficient routing.
I agree but until that exists this is the best thing we have. It's the only way you can pay cents without doing anything else than click a button.
Better to evolve a micropayments model that works
If legit sites start doing this, users will get used to it and hackers will bring in more cash.
CoinHive didn't fix this, as far as I understand. They simply published an alternative miner. As recently as a week ago, many UK and US gov sites were cryptojacked using the CoinHive software: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj5m4v/cryptocurr...
They don't even seem to be trying to root out malicious users:
>The team don’t specifically track domains, so if a user’s email address is not, for example, “contact@website.com,” Coinhive often don’t know where or how the service is being used, though.
Why not just halt all payouts to the old software and only pay out to versions which are using the Authedmine.com version?
Why not do KYC on people who have a very high likelihood of using your software to violate the law?
Salon is the kind of magazine which will call (justly) for corporate responsibility in all sorts of industries, but when it comes to software makers just totally not doing the basic, easy things when it comes to respecting web security, they'll pay them.
Halting payouts to those using the old software leaves legitimate users out to dry as well - whatever they do, someone is going to be miffed. I assume there will be a point in the future when they do refuse service to all the old API endpoints, but they can't rush that.