The Pirate Bay tested the miner as an alternative to advertising banners on the site

Maintenance and maintenance of network equipment requires funds, sometimes - very significant. In the case of The Pirate Bay, there is a lot of equipment, and money, respectively, is also required decently. Therefore, the resource team is concerned about obtaining the necessary amount of finance that is needed to maintain the operation of their systems. Usually funds are earned through advertising - banners or all sorts of pop-up windows. The user either clicks on the banner, moving to the advertised resource, or watching the video. Well, the site where all this is placed, receives money from the advertiser.



With the development of technology blocking advertising revenues of sites that place it, began to fall. This problem has touched The Pirate Bay. The team tries other methods of earning, including the usual request to transfer money in different ways. Yesterday it became known that the administration decided to test a completely unusual way to make money. It is about placing the cryptominer code on the resource pages.



In other words, each user who visited The Pirate Bay, when this code was placed on the pages, provided the computing power of his computer to the miner. He worked, and the naming funds went to the administration wallet of the torrent tracker. Written by miner JavaScript.



All anything, but the administration has not warned its users about this kind of tests. Everything was done silently. How did all this become public? The fact is that some users have noticed the slow work of their computer while browsing a number of pages of a torrent tracker. After that, the most thoughtful decided to view the source code of the pages, and immediately discovered the presence of an unknown script, which was easily identified as a miner. Code provided by Coinhive . The script itself is sharpened on the mining of Monero - cryptocurrency, which is considered one of the most anonymous. Tracking transactions and users Monero if possible, it is very difficult.







The miner has a rather strong load on the target machine, so a decrease in performance can be noticed immediately. Many users began to complain to the administration of the resource, outraged by the actions of the tracker team. Moreover, one of the few moderators with the nickname Sid does not agree with the actions of their colleagues. He suggested that all users who are against the current state of affairs activate the NoScript browser plugin. This is not very convenient, because when it is turned on, the functionality of a number of sites, including the Pirate Bay (on the client side, of course) will suffer. For example, users of the “pirate bay” that included the blocker will not be able to scroll through comments, comment on torrents and view the list of files.



However, disabling execution of scripts allows the miner to stop working, so that the performance of the computer from which The Pirate Bay session is opened does not affect the presence of the script.



After some time, the administration of The Pirate Bay reported that testing was carried out for a short period of time (24 hours). Nothing is known about the results so far, but in the future this way of earning may become an alternative to placing advertising banners on The Pirate Bay. Perhaps other resources will use the experience of colleagues to verify the profitability of "web-mining".







The justification for The Pirate bay team can be a small amount of financial support provided by users. Last year it was reported that, despite the very high attendance, donations resource receives very little. The Pirate Bay began accepting donations in Bitcoins three years ago, becoming one of the first resources on the Web who started working with cryptocurrencies. But for the whole last year, the “bay” received only about $ 3,500. The already closed KickassTorrents sum of donations in Bitcoin was even less, at about 24 cents a day.



Whatever it was, but the administration of the “bay” should, if not ask about the consent of users with their actions, then at least warn them about everything.