
Blocking cryptominers from Firefox - joeyespo
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/block-cryptominers-with-firefox/
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bastawhiz
Somewhat related question: do web-based cryptomining scripts produce a
meaningful profit for website operators? Or is this the sort of thing where
the person inserting the script is making only a few dollars, but it's so easy
to deploy that there's relatively little downside for them?

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popotamonga
a single site with 1k users month used to make me 30€/m. 2 yrs ago.

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disqard
I'm curious: did you inform your website users that, by visiting your site,
they were running a bitcoin miner?

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pojzon
Ofcourse not.. it would be 10 users per month if he did. People dont like to
be used even when notified.

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bartread
I'm curious: how do you think this differs from running ads?

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anilakar
Any responsible adult who knows the collective environmental effects of
cryptomining will refuse to take any part in it, regardless how small they are
for running a miner script for thirty seconds or so.

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runn1ng
Well I was thinking, what smart algorithm are they using to detect that? Some
ML?

It turns out it’s just a third party domain ban list.

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lacampbell
Why do we treat advertisements and crypto-mining so differently?

They both waste your machines resources, without specific opt in, to generate
a profit.

 _Unauthorized cryptominers are scripts ... that run energy-sucking operations
on your web browser without your knowledge or consent. They literally steal
your system’s computing power to make money. We think that’s deeply shady..._

What then, are advertisements?

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vidyesh
Advertisements eat resources while loading and once that is done they do not
keep refreshing themselves to eat more resources.

Cryptominers have a very different behavior. They reserve a % of system
resources to keep running in the background as long as the site is kept open
even in a dormant tab. So if your system is at 10% load usually, cryptominers
could keep them at 20-30%+ load all the time they are in memory without the
user knowing it nor approving it. Unlike advertisements we do not see them
running or loaded in front of our eyes either. Don't you think this is very
invasive?

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Beldin
_Advertisements eat resources while loading and once that is done they do not
keep refreshing themselves to eat more resources._

That is no longer true - on several sites (eg. Ars Technica), ads are loaded
and refreshed after a short period.

I haven't yet seen anything close to as resource-intensive as a cryptominer
yet... in terms of CPU. In terms of bandwidth, I would not be surprised if
most ads consume more than cryptominers.

~~~
vidyesh
_That is no longer true - on several sites (eg. Ars Technica), ads are loaded
and refreshed after a short period._

Auto-refresh ads still do most of the work on the ad servers and very small
amount of resources are eaten on the user side in the browser. This too is
done with a predefined logic which are user-action based or event-based. Time-
based auto-refresh ads are only seen on bigger sites which usually have very
high average session times. So regular news and clickbaity sites won't
necessarily have those. Auto-refresh ads are only served by bigger ad networks
which server bigger sites, Google Adsense do not allow auto-refresh ads.
Google Ad Exchange does but that network is for bigger sites. This weeds out
all the potential scammy/spammy sites which go for exploiting user resources
like cryptominers do.

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Causality1
Cryptominers are one of the many reasons I run NoScript with a whitelist.

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jakeogh
Would be nice to -STOP and -CONT as tabs are switched. It's per-process now
isnt it?

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floatingatoll
While not to the degree of “immediate total halt” when backgrounders,
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Page_Visibi...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Page_Visibility_API) may be of interest for understanding what
kind of background throttling may be in place for all tabs.

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szhu
Is it just me, or do Firefox's ad campaigns lean slightly on the fearmongering
side?

When computers run slowly, there are a few likely reasons why -- none of which
involve cryptomining. When I've fixed my friends' computers for "slowness", I
have never found the culprit to be cryptomining -- it's almost always because
they have a lot of apps and tabs open. (I've typically solved the problem by
showing them how to quit apps and by installing the OneTab and Great Suspender
extensions, which, in short, remember the URLs of the open tabs while
discarding their page contents.) It's true that sometimes, particular tabs are
causing the slowness, but it's almost always just multiple
Facebook/YouTube/Google Docs tabs rather than a random site with cryptomining.

On the other hand, the linked blog post makes it seem like cryptomining is by
far the main reason why users' computers are slow. Sure, it doesn't directly
say that Firefox is the only way to solve slowness, but the strong implication
is that slowness is necessarily caused by cryptomining. Since Firefox is the
only major browser that blocks cryptomining natively, well, then Firefox
becomes the obvious choice.

I'm displeased that Mozilla leaves out any way for the reader to know whether
their slowness is caused by cryptomining (bc it probably isn't). It seems
weird for an organization that fights for freedoms to use strategies like
this.

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theamk
You sure about that? One of the problems with cryptominers is they make your
machine slow when there are lots of tabs open. Great Suspender works great
against cryptomineers.

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tootahe45
Cryptominers for the browser are basically non-existent because of how
ineffective they are at making money.Should probably focus on something more
useful than adding a few sites to the block list and making it out to be a big
deal..

