The Pirate Bay, it seems, has hit upon a novel method of minting cash; and as unlikely as it might seem, unsuspecting visitors to the torrent site like us are helping it achieve its objective. Interestingly, our contribution to the endeavor is our CPU power which is being tapped to mine the Monero cryptocurrency.
Of course, the most visible sign of that happening will be your computer settling into a crawl when you are visiting certain pages on the torrent site. For that is when your computer power is being hijacked to perform tasks you would seldom have consent for.
All of this is being pulled off using a javascript plugin planted within the site’s HTML coding. Developed by Coinhive, the script has been specifically tuned to have its rate hover between 0.6 and 0.8 but still has a noticeable impact on a computer’s resources.
The plugin is also being seen is a possible future replacement of banner ads to ensure revenue flow remains intact. This again assumes significance given the growing resentment against online ads and the widespread adoption of ad blocker plugins.
That said, visitors to the Pirate Bay site has expressed dismay in the manner the website has resorted to test the plugin without seeking permission from the users. In fact, there has not even been an intimation of there being a special plugin being tested.
The Pirate Bay Forum administrator too has expressed his reservations in the manner the plugin is being tested, leading to severe inconvenience to bona fide users. He also assures the issues are being looked into with all the sincerity that it deserved and expressed hope things would revert back to normalcy sooner rather than later.
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The admin also stated they would be using NoScript blocker with immediate effect to keep the plugin under check. However, while that will spare visitors’ PC from spiking unnecessarily, there is going to be a few inconveniences to be endured in the short term, such as the inability to view the file list or posting comments. Scrolling comment pages too will remain disabled until a more permanent solution is achieved.
