Unwanted Coin Mining and Your CPU

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I’m a home PC user and one of my usual websites just put up a disclaimer about giving permission for my excess resources to be used for JSEcoin mining.  Had no idea what that was, so I looked it up and it’s a thing now.  Sounds like my idle CPU gets used by “somebody” for coin mining in lieu of ad revenue for the site.  I’m supposed to see no ads or something.  My questions:  Does this download malware?  Does it harm my PC?  Is this even legal?  And should I go along with it for the sake of using the website?  Right now, I have stopped using the site and don’t like the sound of this at all.  Any responses or advice would be appreciated

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Elly

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That is giving some other entity permission to use the resources of your machine!

Personally, I would never do that. And I would steer clear of any website that made such a request as a requirement for using it.

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Elly

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Coin-miners are harmful to your computer because they use all your remaining or idle computer resources for coin-mining. Imagine running your car at maximum speed whenever you are on the highway everyday. This will also result in very laggy web-browsing once the coin-miners are installed in your browser, even though you have left the website with coin-miners, ie they likely persist in the browsers.

Coin-miners need to be always blocked, either by installing a browser extension, eg No Coin, or by adding the No Coin filter to the Adblock Plus extension/addon, or by other methods.

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SueW

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There are those that join bona fides  crowd-sourced research projects by lending part of their idle CPU time to scientific projects. Is there anyone here that knows enough about this and is able to say something definite about what, if any, problems this might have caused, or be causing, to those willing participants? Thanks.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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Thanks for your replies, that what I figured, but I didn’t even know this was going on.  My CPU usage seems low enough, IE shows nothing, I ran a full Microsoft Security and no threats showed up.  I don’t think anything got loaded onto the PC or IE.  Let’s hope not.  I can’t see how a website would think putting viewers at risk is a good source of revenue, but I am not going back there again.  Too bad.  All these schemes are getting to much for average PC users, it’s really a shame..

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