The Pirate Bay Added a CPU Hijacking Bitcoin Miner to Some Pages. File sharing websites are not exactly known for their sterling reputation, though a few such as famed torrent site the Pirate Bay have been around for long enough while generally avoiding shady behavior theyve acquired a certain cachet with the internet community. But gotta gett that cash, baby, and banner ads might not be cutting it any more in the age of ubiquitous ad blocking. The Pirate Bay has added a Javascript based bitcoin miner to its homepage, Torrent Freak wrote, causing some users to notice that their CPU usage increased dramatically when they browsed certain Pirate Bay pages. The plugin, which is provided by Coinhive, puts users computers to work mining Monero, a cryptocurrency released in 2. According to Torrent Freak, the miner was throttled to rates from between 0. Filesharing websites are not exactly known for their sterling reputation, though a few such as famed torrent site the Pirate Bay have been around for long enough. Scan Flow Software. Noregistration upload of files up to 250MB. Not available in some countries. Singles Discography for Mercury Records 70000 series most if not all were issued as 78s and 45s. RBKiL59brXA/hqdefault.jpg' alt='Torrent Lee Scratch Perry Discography' title='Torrent Lee Scratch Perry Discography' />Coinhives website does result in an immediate and hard to miss increase in CPU utilization. Torrent Freak said they were told the miner was being tested for 2. In the meantime, users on the Pirate Bays subreddit were not happy, with several users complaining that the site never informed users the miner was running, let alone asked permission. Using a file sharing website was never going to be a risk free endeavor, though users could disable the miner with a plugin like No. Script or Script. Block or by adding Coinhive to an ad blockers blacklist. Embedding bitcoin mining scripts into a website is not exactly new, though the secret addition of Coinhive to one of the worlds most popular file sharing websites is throwing up red flags. As noted by Beta. News, Coinhives own documentation advises The miner itself does not come with a UI its your responsibility to tell your users whats going on and to provide stats on mined hashes. While its possible to run the miner without informing your users, we strongly advise against it. You know this. Long term goodwill of your users is much more important than any short term profits. Malware which siphons unsuspecting users CPUs for spare cycles to mine cryptocurrency is a common problem, though peaked years ago in 2. Torrent Lee Scratch Perry Discography' title='Torrent Lee Scratch Perry Discography' />Quartz. The amount of processing power it takes to mine Bitcoin has risen 7. However, with the ongoing explosion in initial coin offerings and new crypto variants, there might still be opportunities to cash in with methods that have stopped working with older cryptocurrencies.