The Pirate Bay briefly put code on some of its web pages that used visitors’ machines to mine a virtual currency.<\/p>\n
The hidden code helped the file-sharing site generate coins for the Monero digital currency.<\/p>\n
The Pirate Bay’s administrators said\u00a0using the code had been an experiment to see whether it could provide a way to end its reliance on ad revenue.<\/p>\n
But many visitors objected to the code being foisted on them without any prior notification.<\/p>\n
One Monero coin is currently worth about $100 (\u00a374).<\/p>\n
The code inserted on The Pirate Bay pages was under development, said the site’s administrators, who also asked people for feedback.<\/p>\n
“Do you want ads or do you want to give away a few of your CPU [central processing unit] cycles every time you visit the site?” they asked.<\/p>\n
A note added to the blog post said an error in the code had caused it to try to grab all available CPU power to mine Monero.<\/p>\n
This bug had now been fixed, the administrators said, which should limit how much it used to 30% at most.<\/p>\n
The Pirate Bay had adapted code from software company Coin-Hive for its test.<\/p>\n
Many crypto-currencies work by getting some of those who hold the coins to run code that verifies who has spent or transferred which coins.<\/p>\n
The reward for carrying out this work, known as mining, is typically newly minted coins.<\/p>\n
Ad-blockers or browser add-ons that stopped scripts being run on web pages would also disable the mining code, the administrators said.<\/p>\n
File-sharing news site Torrent Freak said\u00a0the test had been carried out for 24 hours over the weekend and many people had complained.<\/p>\n
Many had called the idea “dumb” and urged The Pirate Bay to disable the code.<\/p>\n
While others had said mining virtual cash was an “interesting idea” but criticised The Pirate Bay for not warning users about the test.<\/p>\n
“Agree on the overall goal,” wrote one contributor, “but not so on the way it runs without explicit knowledge or authorisation of users.”<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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