Back in the day, ads were one of the worst things a website could offer. If you ever felt exploited back then, wait until you find out about the latest method used by websites in order to make money off you. Nowadays, it appears that more and more websites use the computers of their visitors in order to mine for cryptocurrency.

Harmful practice

Mining for cryptocurrency without asking for permission is definitely not a nice thing, and it can directly affect the users. For example, secretly mining from your computer can slow down your machine and it will also drain your battery and use your electricity.

It is easy to understand why most websites want to do this since it can bring a fast profit with no effort at all. “Miners” back up cryptocurrency, and if miners gather a large amount of computing power, the users can receive considerable sums of money.

Since it is hard to get that many computers and it also requires a lot of electricity, many websites (and even applications) use shady methods in order to take advantage of other computers. However, doing something like that without the users’ consent is not something that a trust-worthy website would do.

Showtime and The Pirate Bay were caught with mining codes

The Pirate Bay is the most popular torrent site at this moment and Showtime is a US streaming service that has numerous fans. However, it appears that they both decided to exploit their visitors. It has been discovered that both websites sent mining code to their users. Showtime removed its code this Monday, but it refused to release a statement.

The Pirate Bay however, talked about this and declared that it was “just a test”.