More precisely, it's like selling a crypto miner with every new car. The use case overlap with a piece of security software is close to zero.

Don't give them any ideas, I can see this actually happening.

How long before one has to worry about electric car mechanics surreptitiously installing crypto mining hardware on cars?

Maybe I’m missing something, but what’s so wrong with selling a bike rack with every new car? Seems a bit silly, but I’d expect it would encourage cycling while slightly raising the price of cars which are already under priced relative to the externalities they cause.

It's more like selling a bike rack with a new car, that you have to pay $15 to the car company every time you use. The biggest issue I see is that Norton is charging their users a fee to use their own hardware to mine crypto.

The ethereum crypto minor for many would be a reoccurring net loss (or a negative externality on the person paying for electricity).

> “Norton is pretty much amplifying energy consumption worldwide, costing their customers more in electricity use than the customer makes on the mining, yet allowing Norton to make a ton of profit,” tweeted security researcher Chris Vickery.

Which is unlike a bike rack which if enabled/purchased but never used would be a one time loss. And for some one likely to transport bikes the bike rack would probably be beneficial.

Edit: After doing some calculations for profitability with say the RTX 3070 with a hash rate of 60.5 MH/s and a power consumption of 160 W [0] at both the min and max average US state electricity prices of .1038 $/KWh and .3428 $/KWh respectively [1] is currently profitable with a return of $2.86/day and $1.94/day respectively [2] (ignoring all other costs).

So for some this would be profitable for them with a potential reduction in the lifetime of their hardware.

0: https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3070-m...!

1: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

2: https://minerstat.com/coin/ETH

It is disabled by default

> Norton Crypto is an opt-in feature only and is not enabled without user permission