With pirate sites finding themselves squeezed by initiatives designed to deprive them of advertising cash, many have turned to more creative ways of generating revenue.
Last September, users of The Pirate Bay complained that their CPU usage increased dramatically when they browsed certain Pirate Bay pages. It was later revealed that the site had implemented a Monero cryptocurrency miner provided by Coinhive.
The development generated negative publicity which nudged the site’s operators to issue a statement.
“As you may have noticed we are testing a Monero javascript miner. This is only a test. We really want to get rid of all the ads. But we also need enough money to keep the site running,” they said.
Just a month later and after a short break, the miner was back again, to the disappointment of users. While many people objected to the mining overall, most seemed disappointed that they weren’t given the chance to opt out.
In the months that followed it was unclear whether TPB would abandon its mining efforts but developments in recent weeks have answered that question.
An initial report from an uploader, that TPB had added a miner to the upload page, was soon followed up with general complaints of a miner being implemented on other parts of the site.
As the image shows, mining is throttled to 0.9 (in the past rates between 0.6 and 0.8 were used), but with reports of hot CPUs on record, it’s clear that people would prefer to have the option not to ‘donate’ their cycles.
Previously, TPB supermoderator Sid expressed disappointment at the existence of the miner and after the latest revelations he’s on record again and sounding rather less patient. The solution, he says, is to enable a good adblocker and spend as little time on the site as possible.
“All you require from TPB is a magnet link. Open the site. Find a torrent. Click the magnet link. Close the site. End of miner,” he writes.
“If you are ever on TPB for more than 5 minutes or so you’re doing it wrong. And if you’re ever on TPB without an ad blocker you’re doing it doubly wrong.”
While some ad-blockers can do the trick, dedicated coin mining blockers are available in the Chrome store, for example, which makes the process very easy indeed.
Knowledgeable users are also able to use such addons to whitelist sites they want to support.
The option to block TPB’s mining efforts was previously mentioned by the site’s operators in a blog post but novice users are unlikely to understand what’s happening to their machines, let alone do anything about it.
Update: The Pirate Bay added the following notice at the bottom of the site:
“By entering TPB you agree to XMR being mined using your CPU. If you don’t agree please leave now or install an adBlocker.”
