It says you're joined to a mining pool. Is this a Norton 360-only mining pool? If so, I'm guessing they have their own hardware participating in the pool as well. And if that's the case, you're helping them mine for blocks just as much as you're helping yourself. But they don't say that anywhere so who knows.
edit: and it also appears that they're taking 15% of whatever you mine.
So they've apparently:
* Set up a Norton-only pool
* Joined all their customers computers to it
* Collect 360 subscription fees to participate
* Collect 15% of everything their customers mine
* Participate in the pool themselves, further benefiting from their customers mining activity
And what happens to the unclaimed/unused wallets that they're holding for their oblivious customers in "the cloud"? If I cared enough about this to read the fine print I bet I'll find that they're reserving the right to empty those after a certain period of inactivity.
For that matter: what happens when Norton gets hacked and loses the cryptocurrency they've been holding for their users?
Users must explicitly agree to a Norton Crypto License and Services Agreement and activate mining before the software starts mining Ethereum. It is unlikely there would be any oblivious customers.
See https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v...
When I install a pdf reader, I expect a pdf reader and nothing else. When I install anti virus software, that's the only thing I want.
that sentence doesn't exactly inspire confidence lol. So you're saying people are aware of the fact that they're partially writing malware like software and that's.. accepted? That's like an accounting firm saying "don't judge us like that, there's much more going on here than the money laundering"
No, but the decision to work and continue working there does.
If "the decision to work and continue working there" is a bad one, that makes the decision to leave a better decision, yes? And the person who makes such a decision, a better person. And if you want to hire people who have agency and act with integrity, someone who left Norton is a slightly higher signal than someone who never heard of Norton, isn't it?
They joined in to a root comment reminding people to reject Norton employee resumes, by saying that Norton people who don't get other jobs are morally bad people and programmers are free agents who could get other jobs (by implication they would do so if they were morally good people). Under this worldview, leaving shows moral goodness so hiring them should be encouraged more than hiring a random person. Saying "nuh uh" isn't enough to wriggle out of it.
1. Pick a human at random, you have no information
about their character.
2. Hurting people is bad.
3. It is possible to unknowingly hurt people, which does
not reflect on moral character.
4. Learning that you are hurting people, and then continuing
to do so is morally bad.
5. Learning that you are hurting people, and then stopping
is morally better.
6. Therefore you have more information of good moral character
about someone who has learned that they are hurting people and stopped,
than about the unknown person in 1.
7. It is not reasonable to expect every job seeking person to know
about every company reputation, or the crypto miner management might
ask them to work on at some point in future.
8. Working at a company involves learning a lot more about what they do.
9. Learning that what they do is hurting people, and leaving,
is more evidence of moral goodness than you know about
an unknown random job applicant from an unknown previous employer.
If so, then you disagree with the parent commenter's "everyone has the freedom to get another job" because if nobody should hire them, they don't have said freedom.
1.No, but it is still malicious in the sense that it:
(1) does not inform the user or ask for consent
(2) seemingly does not offer an option to disable it
While I want to apply Occam's razor here, you'd have to assume all of the people that worked on this were negligent or unqualified... when sadly the more likely scenario is that these decisions were most likely intentional.
> (2) seemingly does not offer an option to disable it
Where do you see this? As far as I can tell, it is off by default, and the user must explicitly enable it (consent) to use the miner.
See e.g. https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v... which mentions a License and Services Agreement that must be accepted before the miner can be used at all, and clearly says the mining status can be toggled between Active and Paused.
This is pretty ridiculous. I worked there and and there is much more going on internally than writing malware-like software. By the time I left they still had pretty decent engineers just trying to find a job in a better company, like me.
These sort of decisions don't come from Software Engineers and management there is known to be pretty shitty.
Also, it's not like they maliciously inserted this thing to mine crypto for Norton itself. Whatever your computer mines is yours (still a bad idea though IMO)
https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announ...