Pirate Bay digs itself a new hole: Mining alt-coin in slurper browsers Bittorrent search engine and mortal enemy of intellectual property lawyers, The Pirate Bay, has upset the one group of people that actually likes it: its users. Over the weekend, visitors to the infamous file-sharing watering hole were surprised to find their browsers working overtime, with their computers' CPU usage rocketing …
What is this rarbg.com? Never heard of it and when I try to visit it I just get this message
"
Content Denied
Access to this website has been disabled by an order of the Federal Court of Australia because it infringes or facilitates the infringement of copyright.
1800 086 346 for information.
"
Because there can be nothing a browser should ever do that wouldn't be superseded by my need to keep my machine responsive AND the need to keep all adjacent, well-behaving tabs ALSO responsive. As such, any tab that endeavours eating more than 15% of a single core should ask me for the privilege explicitly, by domain, no tabs other than the one I'm looking at should be allowed to execute ANYTHING unless it has special permission from me because it's a background music player or something (also by domain), and the browser itself should never go over 50% or so on a single core, the way Firefox currently eats 100% of my CPU for a full fucking minute every fucking hour as it does now.
You'll get downvotes from the luddites around here, who seem to think javascript is the work of the devil, but have an upvote from me. I've played with javascript implementations of emulators, native javascript games, I seem to remember there is even a javascript port of ffmpeg for encoding video in the browser, etc etc. It makes no more sense to cap the cpu utilisation of javascript apps running in the browser than it does to cap the cpu utilisation of native applications; cpu-intensive apps need lots of cpu, wherever they're running, the cpu is there to be used.
There is a huge difference between code running in the browser and native applications. Assuming they are not malware, native applications are there because they are either part of the OS, or have been installed and started deliberately.
Something running the the browser is there because someone decided to stick it on a web page. As this incident shows, users may not even know its there. I do not want something I may not want, and may not even know is running hogging my CPU
I love the part where a boycott is discussed.
I'd imagine the typical/average user of that site would accept anything upto and including the owners of TPB nipping round to personally finger them in order to make sure they don't have to pay and/or wait to watch the latest TV etc.
until you see this happening across the board. And not on pirate-terrorists sites. Think mainstream, think majority of web pages. Now, they'll start with "do you want to have ads, or do you want THIS teeeeeny-tiny contribution to our coffers? And then, it'll end up as usual - THIS with ads on top.
It'll never be "or". You'd be surprised how many recently-Patreon-supported sites pin a "maybe I should remove some ads (but not ALL!)" target to a surprisingly large target figure. If even modestly popular, mostly rather obscure / niche sites make that kind of money off advertising solely due to the traffic generated by their in-crowd (who quite likely never ever click an ad by the way), we'll NEVER get any alternative options to ads.
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