Not cool, maybe
ALT-STREAMING AND DOWNLOAD SERVICE The Pirate Bay has been found to have some code hidden in its website that allowed it to mine virtual currency using visitors’ CPU power.
TorrentFreak reports on the unexpected news, saying that the site was mining Monero currency in a bid to make some easy money. Users, naturally, aren’t happy.
«A few hours ago many Pirate Bay users began noticing that their CPU usage increased dramatically when they browsed certain Pirate Bay pages. Upon closer inspection, this spike appears to have been caused by a Bitcoin miner embedded on the site,» reports TorrentFreak.
«The code in question is tucked away in the site’s footer and uses a miner provided by Coinhive. This service offers site owners the option to convert the CPU power of users into Monero coins. The miner does indeed appear to increase CPU usage quite a bit. It is throttled at different rates (we’ve seen both 0.6 and 0.8) but the increase in resources is immediately noticeable.»
The Coinhive miner is embedded in the site, but not all of it. TorrentFreak points to a Reddit thread where users have come across it and are not happy. It adds that the Pirate Bay has not officially responded, but that one of its peoples has expressed concerns in a forum post.
«ffs [That’s addressed to Winston not you lot]» wrote super moderator Sid on the pirates-forum.org website in response to complaints . «That really is serious, so hopefully we can get some action on it quickly. And perhaps get some attention for the uploading and commenting bugs while they’re at it.»
Sid later returned to the forum, telling users to use NoScript to block the miner or just block Javascript. He added that this could cause some performance compromises.
It is worth pointing out that not all reactions to the miner are negative, with some users saying that TPB could have just asked in the first place. µ
