Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners

Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by gkya on Sunday September 17, 2017 @06:12PM (#15271980)

I'd rather pay with my wallet than with my battery. And I'll pay only what I buy. Lock me out if I don't pay, or tell me to GTFO, and I'm totally fine with it, but you can't pick my hypotethical-pocket because I opened up your page. This is like charging window-shoppers.

And like a sibling comment says, if this catches on, most web sites will do both, i.e. ads + client-side mining.

One nice day publishing industry will no longer be an industry but a group of non-profits, which won't have to sell stuff, and publish way more objective and high-quality stuff.

edit: grammar

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by saimiam on Sunday September 17, 2017 @08:13PM (#15272459)

> rather pay with my wallet

I'm going to throw my solution in the ring for HN's consideration - https://Datajoy.us/fupm.html: lets make paying for content so simple that both you and the domain owner can happily set it up and let it do its thing behind the scenes as you surf the web.

Right now, it is being trialed for blogs and other top level domain content providers. First payments will be made Oct 1st.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by gkya on Sunday September 17, 2017 @08:49PM (#15272599)

Looks interesting. Maybe you should submit it here for discussion and publicity.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by saimiam on Sunday September 17, 2017 @08:54PM (#15272613)

Thank you. I have submitted it before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15197728

If there's interest, I can resubmit it as a new Show HN thread.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by sillysaurus3 on Sunday September 17, 2017 @07:01PM (#15272175)

I'd argue that ads already pick your pocket just for window shopping the page.

There's no such thing as Adblock for video streams on Twitch anymore; the ads are burned into the stream, so you can't block them. (Hopefully YouTube won't switch to the same tech.)

Is that picking your pocket just for watching a video steam? If not, why is a video steam materially different from consuming a website?

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by gkya on Sunday September 17, 2017 @08:17PM (#15272472)

Ad money comes from a third party, not me. Whereas with this coinhive thing, I'm paying with my computational power and my battery (which is the most important thing here). Traditional internet ads increase resource consumption too, which is part of why we block them. Ads that are part of a video are different, you can skip them, and they cant breach your privacy (I dont know what Twitch are doing, though).

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by sillysaurus3 on Sunday September 17, 2017 @08:21PM (#15272487)

(You can't skip them, sadly. The video won't buffer until the ad has fully buffered, which happens in real time.)

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by sleepychu on Monday September 18, 2017 @05:30AM (#15274454)

Baked in v.s. player.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by Tharre on Sunday September 17, 2017 @07:14PM (#15272228)

> the ads are burned into the stream, so you can't block them.

Source? Adblock seems to work fine.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by sillysaurus3 on Sunday September 17, 2017 @07:16PM (#15272242)

https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/60001...

It's clearly the future of ad delivery. If you burn ads into video, you can't block them short of doing some kind of realtime detection against the video frames.

It absolutely sucks because the pause button has become a "play ad" button. There's no way to temporarily pause anymore without showing an ad. Hopefully they won't realize they can do the same thing for the mute button.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by otakucode on Monday September 18, 2017 @12:46PM (#15277415)

Back before cable companies gave everyone a DVR to try to kill Tivo (their plan was kill Tivo then kill the DVR but courts got in their way), I had a hacked Tivo with a network card. I could pull recorded shows off onto my PC. And then the PC would run a custom bit of software that would process the video and strip out the commercials (or you could have it just insert auto-jumps for the Tivo to follow). That was back in the very early 2000s... so I'd expect this would not be difficult at all now. The software back then did raw processing of the stream and, as I understood it, looked for stacks of I-frames and fade-to-black as well as volume differences. Those stats might be different for online ads, but a little experimentation would solve it.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by devotedtoneu on Monday September 18, 2017 @02:59PM (#15278528)

I'm being unrelated, but thank you for this comment.

This instantly brought me back to the 2003/2004 Computer Magazine articles with customized TiVo Setups or homebrewed alternatives entirely running on a media center PC.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by otakucode on Monday September 18, 2017 @07:10PM (#15280494)

It was a fun time! I got to find out that if your local cable company responds with "huh?" when you ask for a cable box with an active firewire port (just for reliable channel changing, I was never able to get video) and then call the state utilities commission when they refuse... you get a call from the actual owner of the local Time Warner franchise confused out of his mind! That was fun... he called saying "you were asking about whether our cable boxes were fireproof?" so I got to explain what Firewire was, that they were legally obligated to provide a box with an active port if I requested one under such-and-such FCC regulation, etc. They eventually figured out what checkbox on my account to tick and I got it.

I still have the hacked Tivo with its network card actually, down in the basement. Hasn't been used for probably going on a decade, but I loved that thing to death while it lasted.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by devotedtoneu on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @07:12AM (#15283508)

I would've never guessed providing a channel-changing interface over firewire would be law! That's very interesting.

Sounds like you might've been the first to ask!

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by Tharre on Sunday September 17, 2017 @07:23PM (#15272266)

The fix for that is simple, use an external player, then they can't mess with your stop/mute/whatever buttons.

I still can't reproduce any of this though, I get 0 ads on any of the streams I clicked through.

EDIT: To fix stop/start you of course need to keep buffering the video.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by sillysaurus3 on Sunday September 17, 2017 @07:27PM (#15272278)

That'd fix the mute button, but if you stop and start the stream, you'll get an ad regardless of the player.

Tune in to Vinesauce (https://twitch.tv/vinesauce) tonight at around 9PM-10PM PST. In addition to being a fun Sunday stream, you'll be able to see first hand what the new ad delivery system is like.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by wingworks on Monday September 18, 2017 @01:19AM (#15273565)

He's streaming right now, just checked it and didn't get any ad.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by earenndil on Sunday September 17, 2017 @10:59PM (#15273083)

I believe some university was working on a computer vision-based adblock.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by _coldfire on Monday September 18, 2017 @01:34AM (#15273597)

And how much computational power will that need?

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by tw04 on Sunday September 17, 2017 @10:52PM (#15273054)

...you do realize "non-profit" doesn't mean they don't make money, right? It means they don't show a profit. They still need to monetize their offering, and unless you've got a solution yet to be offered up... it'll be the exact same thing as "for-profit" companies do. As for "objective" - most non-profits are far less objective because they thrive off donations.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by yjftsjthsd-h on Sunday September 17, 2017 @06:51PM (#15272145)

If you have some criticism, please share with the class. As it is, I can't even tell what you're being dismissive of.

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Re:Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners by nurettin on Monday September 18, 2017 @09:30AM (#15275709)

Throwaway account means just that. No point in replying to them. They don't log back in to reply to you. They just waste space with random comments and get downvoted to deletion. HN accepts and welcomes this behavior in exchange for simpler account creation process.

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