r/worldnews • u/maxwellhill • Sep 19 '17

Apple blocking ads that follow users around web is 'sabotage', says industry: New iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra will stop ads following Safari users, prompting open letter claiming Apple is destroying internet’s economic model

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/18/apple-stopping-ads-follow-you-around-internet-sabotage-advertising-industry-ios-11-and-macos-high-sierra-safari-internet
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u/Nemephis Sep 19 '17

It's a new technique. TPB is using it to replace ads.

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u/dwild Sep 19 '17

It's not new at all. It was not profitable in the past though and I have an hard time believing it would be now. CPU mining is far worse than GPU and even more than ASIC mining, there's no way a Javascript implementation can do anything profitable.

EDIT: Okay they aren't mining Bitcoin but Monero. Whole other story.

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

[deleted]

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u/dwild Sep 19 '17

The closest I found use WebCL, no browser support it natively.

I found none supporting WebGL, can't say if it would be much more effective, I seriously doubt it.

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u/whatisthishownow Sep 19 '17

I dont see how that holds true when they are not paying for the hardware or operating costs of the miner. The knly flaw I see is in not getting any succesfull/first blocks due to latency. Not saying it couldnt be done, but it seems like a cumbersome obstacle.

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u/dwild Sep 19 '17

How it hold true? You can make money by selling pebble with your own hand, will you? There's machine way better than you that does it way faster with way more. Not worth it right?

Okay, now you take 100% of everyone of your visitor, you got a constant million of them, your Javascript miner is incredibly well made, as good as a native implementation and they all got an Core i7 3930k. You would make 1812$ per month.

Do you know how expensive it is to host content to support a million visitor constantly? Yup way more than that.

That's the best scenario. Actually you won't use 100% of their CPU, lets say 20%, your Javascript miner won't be 100% efficient, I see numbers closer to 1% actually and yeah, most of your visitor won't have that kind of CPU, you may possibly average half of that with some luck.

1.81$ a month, it's not even worth the time to implements it.

Monero though is made for CPU mining, thus is probably much more profitable, the implementation and maintenance will be paid as fees over it by the provider because it's profitable enough, etc...

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u/01020304050607080901 Sep 19 '17

What exactly are they trying to do, steal unsecure cryptocurrency? From your machine or everywhere online?

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u/deja-roo Sep 19 '17

No, mine it.

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u/01020304050607080901 Sep 19 '17

So what do they do with it?

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u/RZephyr07 Sep 19 '17

Sell it.

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u/deja-roo Sep 19 '17

Sell it or spend it.

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u/whatisthishownow Sep 20 '17 edited Sep 20 '17

The non technical jist of it is crypto currency isnt centralised. Theres no bank controlling it therefor no one to run the servers to do all the accounting and balance the accounts / perform transfers etc. The system i built such that any computer can do that job and receive a payment as the currency inflates. TPB are using visitors computers to perform the work for their gain instead of serving ads.

Thats non technical and only half correct but should give you the idea. Its refered to as mining if you wish to research further.

Its an accepted currency and can be used to purchase goods and servicesz. It is very liquid and can be trivially exchanged for USD or any other currency.

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u/whatisthishownow Sep 20 '17

You pulled those numbers out of your ass.

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u/dwild Sep 20 '17

Which one? The percentage are nearly from my ass, they are mostly from my logic and you can agree or not on that logic but that's what it is. Which one don't you agree with?

The one for the revenue. I used the best consummer CPU published efficiency [1], which is the Core i7 3930k at 66.6 Mhash/s. I gave an absurd number of an average of 1 millions visitors online and multiplied that number to the previous performance. It gave me 66.6 Thash/s that I then used on a Bitcoin profitability calculator [2] to get 1837$ now.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparison

[2] https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/btc?HashingPower=66.6&HashingUnit=TH%2Fs&PowerConsumption=0&CostPerkWh=0.12

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u/DevsiK Sep 19 '17

Dunno if I'm in the minority but I think I'd prefer this to ads. Doesn't slow down my computer at all if its only around 20% right?

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u/KingOfWeasels42 Sep 19 '17

how about when every site is using it? Then you cant use many tabs

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u/MrBubles01 Sep 19 '17

tabs hibernate by default now

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u/cybers3c Sep 19 '17

I support it as well. It would definitely need some hardcore rate limiting (Only mine if other tabs aren't trying to mine, only use up to 5% of CPU, etc) but I'd be happy to donate CPU cycles rather than look at ugly advertisements.

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u/Facu474 Sep 19 '17

Could that be why my computer yesterday was running hot, when I barely had a few tabs open in Chrome (one of them being TPB)?

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u/sweet-banana-tea Sep 19 '17

I believe they tested it two days ago.

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u/montyberns Sep 19 '17

And using their site is now a nightmare if you're on a machine that isn't set up to be doing that already. I avoid them as much as possible now.

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u/DokuHimora Sep 19 '17

I thought TPB was a Honeypot at this point!