Salon’s optional coin mining site to ad-blockers: Can we use your browser to mine cryptocurrency?

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CyberWisdom Safe Harbor Commentary on Salon’s optional coin mining
A recent story from arstechnica.com says things we don’t talk about Salon’s optional coin mining site lets you avoid ads, but it can drain your CPU power.
Salon.com has a new, cryptocurrency-driven strategy that earns money when readers intercept ads. If you want to read the salon without advertising, as long as you let the site use your spare computing power to tap some coins.
If you visit the salon with ad blocker enabled, you may see a pop-up that asks you to disable the ad blocker or “block ads by allowing them to use your unused computing power.”
Sharon explains what’s happening in the new FAQ. “How can Sharon make money by using my processing power?” Said the FAQ. “We intend to leverage some of your spare processing power to contribute to technology discovery, evolution and innovation, and for our beta program we will begin leveraging your processing power to help support blockchain growth and growth technologies And cryptocurrency. ”
A whole lot of websites and applications are consuming your CPU to mine cryptocurrencies
Although this is a little vague, a second Salon.com popup shows that Salon is using Coinhive for “calculations that are safely performed in the browser’s sandbox.” The Coinhive pop-up on Salon.com offers the option of canceling or allowing digging in a browser session. Click More Info to bring you to the Coinhive page.
Salon’s optional coin mining site “provided by Coinhive” pops up.
We wrote an article about Coinhive in October 2017. Over 2,000 WordPress Sites infected by 2nd Keylogger CoinHive Campaign to monetize Monero cryptocurrencies, which in turn, contributed a fraction of the relatively small revenue to participating sites.”
It does use a lot of CPU power
Today I enabled digging on Salon.com to see how much computing power it used. In Chrome’s Task Manager I got the salon tag 426.7 and higher CPU readings:
The Chrome Assistant’s CPU usage is up to 499 on my 2016 MacBook Pro, which is unusual on my computer and even on Chrome. This accounted for 800% of the total, accounting for four cores, each running two threads:
The bottom of my laptop started to warm up, but the computer still worked fine otherwise. With high Chrome usage, Mac Activity Monitor said that 24% of my CPU power is still idle. After I disabled Salon’s cryptocurrency mining, my idle CPU power rose back to the more typical 70% to 80%.
The computer I used for this experiment had a quad-core Intel Core i7 Skylake processor. Obviously different people will get different results. Although the Sharon digging may not lock your computer, I still do not want it to run in the background, especially when I leave the power outlet.
Salon’s optional coin mining site: There is no security risk
Salon, due to the site’s choice to join the system, readers will not be forced into cryptocurrency mining. However, in other cases, users have no idea that Coinhive is in use on their system. Researchers from security firm Sucuri warned that at least 500 sites running WordPress content management systems have been hacked to run Coinhive mining scripts, “we wrote in an October 2017 article.
Harmful drove money mining disaster shows no sign of reduction
Cryptojacking is still a problem, as we detail in several other articles, including an article yesterday.
Salons infected with the user should not occur in the salon, indicating that readers do not have to choose mining, and said the user’s security is not affected.
“This happens only when you visit Salon.com,” the site’s FAQ says. “There is no software installed on the computer and Sharon has never accessed your personal information or files.”
Sharon pointed out that advertising allows sites to make money from readers without having them pay for subscriptions.
“Back in the 1990s, as it is now, Sharon has provided a common relationship to provide users with ads in exchange for the bulk of the content for free,” Salon wrote. “The principle behind this is that your readership is of value to us and our advertisers, and the fragile relationship has been more disrupted recently with the increasing popularity of ad blocking technology; as with most media websites, ad blocking Go deep into our earnings and build a more one-sided relationship between readers and publishers. ”
Salon does not seem to offer subscription options at the moment, but said it will soon provide a “fast, ads-free experience” in new paid apps for mobile phones and tablets.
Read More…
Salon’s optional coin mining lets you avoid ads, but eats up your CPU power. Engaging post, Read More…
thumbnail courtesy of arstechnica.com

Salon Adds Cryptocurrency Malware — On Purpose
Salon Adds Cryptocurrency Malware — On Purpose

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