A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out. Gas Town fulfilled all its obligations in this regard with these (and other) warnings in the original announcement:
> WARNING DANGER CAUTION
> GET THE F** OUT
> YOU WILL DIE
They honestly only need to disclose. Requiring contribution as part of the social contract is perfectly okay—if someone disagrees, they don’t get to use Gas Town.
> Gas Town “just works.” It does its job, it has tons of integration points, and it has been stable for many weeks. People are using it to build real stuff.
> So as far as I’m concerned, Gas Town is ready. That’s why I feel it merits a 1.0.0 release.
Source: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/gas-town-from-clown-show-to-v...
Actual laugh out loud. 3 months[1].
Imagine picking up software that 3 months ago came along with the disclaimer, "YOU WILL DIE" and complaining about responsible disclosure.
1 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
The neat part though, is agents are so interwoven through its operations, it can kind of power through almost any error. It's a strange-but-real form of resilience.
Accidentally leave a browser tab open and it burns $5 of your electricity overnight to make $2 for the owner of the website.
It's a shame in a way, it also blocked the pseudo-captchas that used mining to limit spam.
(btw that was a really good showcase for WebAssembly. Too bad it's used for illegitimate purposes)
Google Meet consumes 25% of each of 16 hypercores, ffs. On a 7840u. Laptop becomes a toaster.
This probably doesn't help, but I noticed that my everyday computer experience got much better after switching to an M4 Mac. The only time I heard fan was when I was running ffmpeg. Unfortunately that appears to be the solution that works.
> WARNING DANGER CAUTION > GET THE F* OUT > YOU WILL DIE
You cannot be serious...This behaviour is deeply unethical and most likely illegal as well.
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
”But first, before we get into Gas Town’s operation, I need to get rid of you real quick.
WARNING DANGER CAUTION
GET THE F** OUT
YOU WILL DIE
Let’s talk about some of the reasons you shouldn’t use Gas Town. I could think of more, but these should do.”