Ads were yesterday: How some websites are ripping you off
It’s been quite a while since I wrote about anything and lots have changed. I’m planning to write about mining and hash cracking with multiple GPUs but this post is going to be about how cryptocurrency mining has changed the way we see and use websites. If you are not staying under the cave for the last one year, you would have heard about cryptocurrency mining. This post is not about mining so please head to google for more details.
We are all so much used to seeing ads on websites. Online ad companies and search engines make money with ads. But literally, ads were yesterday to make money. Have you realized that a website you visit can use your CPU cycles to make money? Some websites embed a code that makes your browser to run certain algorithms such as Cryptonite (a CPU-friendly algo) and mine coins that support it. The scarier thing is that these websites don’t even make you aware of it.
What you are loosing
The obvious answer is that you are losing your money. When the rouge website mines with your CPU without knowledge, its cycles are unnecessarily wasted, and it can even kill your laptop, if you are using one.
How to block coin mining websites
I use Firefox and I use the No Coin add-on which blocks most websites from executing a specific and most popular mining script. Google Chrome also has this add-on. There maybe more options such as antivirus, firewall, and so on and you are welcome to post your findings in the commenting section.
Some boring Stuff
I mined my first bitcoin sometime in 2011 using my lovely and venerable MSI 5770 Hawk which I had used to write my post on password cracking with a GPU. It’s long dead. Now, I have 2x 1060GTX and 3x RX480 cards, and I am mining different altcoins. Now that I have five cards with about about 30 times the hashing power. I’m planning to write about NTLM and MD5 hash cracking in a few weeks. So stay tuned.
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