Salon offers readers the choice between ads and Monero mining

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The publication on digital media Salon offers its visitors an alternative to traditional online ads: it allows the site to use the processing power of the computer to exploit the cryptocurrency.

In order to provide free content, Salon depended primarily on advertisements to manage their servers, as explained in a blog post published Monday. However, digital ads are not enough to completely pay off most of the media – the site noted that advertising revenue has fallen by $ 40 billion from 1999 to 2010 – and Salon, in particular, has decided to offer users a new option to pay for content.

Salon will profit by selling "a small percentage of [users’] reserve processing power to contribute to the advancement of technological discovery, evolution and innovation, "explained the company, while they do not go out and say it directly, the site, according to The Verge, uses the CoinHive open source software to extract the monroe from cryptocurrency.

"Demand for computing power in various industries and applications is potentially very high, and we intend to use a small percentage of your spare processing power to contribute to the advancement of technological discovery, evolution and innovation. our beta program, we will start by applying your processing power to support the evolution and growth of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology, "the company wrote on the blog.

Contrary to the approach of malware, which tries to use as much as possible the processing power of a computer to maximize the performance deriving from the extraction activity, Salon refuses to actively change the amount of processing power used by the cryptography . miner, explaining:

"We automatically detect your current processing usage and assign a portion of what you are not using to this process.If you start a process that requires more resources from your computer, we automatically reduce the amount we are using for calculations."

Coinhive is one of the most used browser-based mining programs, as previously reported by CoinDesk. The service offers a Javascript-based application that website owners can incorporate into their sites.

However, developers did not expect the malicious actors to use the platform as much as they have. The developers preferred websites to be aware of their use of the miner, according to a Motherboard story.

Image of data mining via Shutterstock

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