Hidden mining is gaining momentum, which cannot but cause some concern for users of personal computers. Quite recently, we wrote that hidden miners have already filled almost the entire Internet. There is no hiding from them; scammers embed web miner scripts into the code of absolutely any website: fromgovernment portalsto trashpornographic sites!

Every time you visit a website, you run the risk of becoming a victim of attackers who want to profit from the computing power of your computer to mine virtual currencies such asBitcoinAndMonero.In this article we will tell you how you can protect yourself and your computer from “pests”.

Hidden mining of virtual currencies is an excellent way to make decent profits with minimal effort (provided you have good equipment, favorable tariff for electricity and the growing rate of the cryptocurrency you mine). This type of activity can be a great alternative source of income, and some websites (and people with more nefarious intentions) are happy to take advantage of this tempting opportunity.

For example, the website Salon.com gives its visitors the opportunity to opt out of advertising in exchange for allowing the site to use the processing power of their processors to mine the cryptocurrency Monero. It is worth noting that Monero is a virtual currency that is much easier to mine than Bitcoin; the current cumulative market capitalization of this cryptocurrency is 4.6 billion US dollars.

Of course, as soon as an attractive option appears in a legal way to earn good money, this option immediately begins to “attract” dishonest people.

Antivirus software company Malwarebytes and IT security company ESET have repeatedly warned about hidden use JavaScript files that steal the processing power of website visitors to mine cryptocurrencies without their knowledge (or their permission). Such a “criminal scheme” can be carried out using malicious software installed on the user’s computer, or undetected JavaScript file, which runs in the background or in a pop-up window mode, allowing you to continue mining virtual currencies even after closing your browser.

If you don’t know how to determine whether your computer’s computing power is being “misused” without your knowledge or not, then you should definitely read this article. And if suddenly this is really the case, then how can you stop this process and protect yourself in the future? In this article, we will introduce you to four ways to protect your computer's computing power from attacks by hidden miners.

Should hidden cryptocurrency miners be blocked?

There is no single answer to the question of whether you should allow websites to use your computer’s computing power to mine cryptocurrencies; it all depends, of course, on your desire and point of view. In most cases, this is absolutely safe, but it is worth noting that such “activity” cannot but affect the performance of your computer. But the main problem is how ethical it is to use other people’s computing power in your own interests, not for its intended purpose.

When a website is completely honest with its visitors and does not hide the fact that it is engaged in web mining of cryptocurrencies, you can absolutely visit such a site and support its content or services, allowing it to use your computing power. This is a great compromise for those who are not big fans of advertising.

However, even though web mining will not cause any harm to your personal computer, it can still significantly affect the performance of your computer (and its time). battery life), and also (albeit slightly) increase your energy bill. If you understand this, have nothing against it and give your consent, then there are no problems. But when websites decide to do this without your knowledge, in the background, it becomes unethical.

How to prevent websites from secretly mining cryptocurrencies using your CPU's processing power?

We will assume that there is no malicious software installed on your computer for hidden cryptocurrency mining. In this case, you have several options on how to prevent websites from mining cryptocurrencies on your personal computer without your consent.

DisableJavaScripton certain sites

If you suspect that a particular website is using your computer's processing power to mine cryptocurrencies without your permission, you can simply block JavaScript entirely.

This option is certainly not ideal and is not without its drawbacks. The problem with this is that it is a very aggressive way to block the web miner, which can affect the operation of many websites. For example, a social site Facebook networks does not load without JavaScript enabled.

Cryptocurrency web miner blockers

If you do not want to use an ad blocker or just want to block only web miners, then here is a list of available cryptocurrency web miner blockers:

• No Coin (for web browsers Chrome, Firefox, Opera);
• minerBlock (for web browsers Chrome, Firefox, Opera);
• Anti Miner (for Chrome web browsers);
• Coin-Hive Blocker (for Chrome web browser).

These blockers “do their job” by blacklisting known domains and mining scripts. This option is very convenient and provides a number of advantages over other alternatives. On the one hand, these blockers regularly update their databases and, in fact, are one of the best options for solving the problem of hidden mining of virtual currencies. On the other hand, if you want to “support” a website, allow it to mine cryptocurrencies using your computing power, then you can simply move that site from a blacklist to a whitelist.

Antivirus software

While browsers aren't yet designed to block mining scripts (or at least can't make it so that this "feature" is enabled only with your consent), some antivirus programs can help you solve the problem of hidden cryptocurrency miners. Software Malwarebytes Corporation, for example, offers the option to block virtual currency web miners in its premium subscription.

and Facebook Messenger, the VKontakte mobile application received this function. The advantage of HTML5 games is that they are easy to create and distribute, and their cross-platform nature makes the HTML5 platform ideal for creating multiplayer games. We will look at the main tools and engines for developing HTML5 games, as well as the possibilities for their distribution.

Frameworks and engines

An HTML5 game can be developed from scratch, but it will be more convenient and easier to do this using numerous engines and frameworks. Here are just a few of them:

A framework for developing 2D games, it is intended not only for professional developers, but also for people who do not know how to program: designers, artists or students. More than 20 plugins and 70 visual effects to create a game that can then be immediately published on multiple platforms. Construct 2 can be tried for free, and full version The instrument costs 6299.9 rubles.

The free and open source engine allows you to create games using Canvas and the WebGL library. There are many examples and tutorials available on the Phaser website to help you create your own game.

A set of open source libraries for game development: EaselJS is designed to work with HTML5 Canvas, SoundJS is for working with audio, TweenJS is for creating animations, and PreloadJS is for managing the loading of all the necessary elements.

An engine for creating 3D games using WebGL. Source code The project is open and constantly updated.

An engine that allows you to create 2D and 3D games and place advertising in these games to make a profit. PlayCanvas is free for public projects, but you can purchase one of two paid versions with advanced features.

According to the creators, the main advantage of PixiJS is its rendering speed. The engine is completely free, it is designed for creating 2D applications: many examples are available on the project website.

There are others useful tools, an extensive list of frameworks for HTML5 game development is available on GitHub. There is even a separate site dedicated to game engines for HTMl5: HTML5gameengine.com.

Wrappers

Using wrappers, you can turn an HTML5 game into a native one for placement in app stores.

Distribution platforms

Cross-platform HTML5 games are conveniently and easily distributed via mobile applications social networks and messengers.

A recent update to the VKontakte application includes the platform Direct Games, for which moderators will select the best projects. To offer your game, you need to integrate it into the code Mobile SDK VKontakte and submit a request for moderation.

You can add your game to Facebook using the plugin for the Cocos2d-X engine. So far this is the only one widely affordable way upload your game to Facebook, as the Instant Games platform for Messenger is currently closed to developers beta testing.

There are also a number of more traditional platforms involved in the publication and distribution of HTML5 games: Kongregate, CoolGames, Softgames, itch.io, Gamemix and others. All of them allow you to host your game for free and monetize it using advertising, in-game purchases or a freemium model. Rakuten Games also recently launched an HTML5 social gaming platform in Japan, R Games.

Education

You can learn how to create HTML5 games using numerous courses: a course from Google on

We are all trying to find income that would not take up a lot of our time, or even better, one day we launched a certain project and forgot, you only withdraw money when needed, and it plows on without you and plows on. :) Dreams, but they are quite achievable.

From history, it is known that as long as computers have existed, their super-relatives have existed for just as long. Today (05/01/2015 according to Google) the most powerful computer the world is Tianhe - 2 (China) .

The Tianhe-2 supercomputer, developed by Inspur in collaboration with the People's Liberation Army Defense Science and Technology University of the People's Republic of China, was launched in 2013. The construction of this giant cost 200-300 million dollars. More than 1,300 scientists and engineers worked on the creation of Tianhe-2, which means “Milky Way-2”.

Its characteristics:

From the wiki - Teraflops (TFLOPS) is a value used to measure computer performance, showing how many floating point operations per second a given computing system performs. 1 teraflops = 1 trillion operations per second = 1000 billion operations per second. Usually we mean operations on 64-bit real numbers in IEEE 754 format.

TFLOPS = 10 12 FLOPS (= 10 3 GFLOPS)

Now, the dramatic aspect is that this is a supercomputer, it consumes an enormous amount of electricity. 1 hour of work on such a computer will cost you ~ $1000. Not too bad, so it is used in exceptional cases, probably only by scientists. There is an opinion that when using such technology, the peak of profitability has long been on the threshold.

However, there is technology "Distributed Computing" which allows you to not only compare with the above, but possibly even surpass it!? It seems to me. Lately, all sorts of communes and clouds have been appearing on the Internet, and I’ll tell you about one of them today.

So MQL5 Cloud Network uses distributed computing in which you (your computer) participate, let me explain:

A program is installed on your computer (you can download it from the link above), a connection to the above specified cloud is configured (login, password). And so (when your computer is not loaded with anything, that is, the cores of the processor are resting) - the cloud gives them a task, the processor solves and gives the decision to the cloud, Who set the task to the cloud!? perhaps someone from Forex is trying to calculate the profit in certain trades, perhaps some engineer from an institute. Now if there are 1000 people like you, then a scientist or trader has 1000 * 4 (intel i5 4 cores) four thousand cores at his disposal to You only need a million participants to overtake a super computer. The owner of the cores is paid bucks. Considering that for the most part your computer is not loaded, then why not get money for it.

How to register and what for how much read, I’ll show you what the interface looks like after registration. Your processor is registered by the number of cores, the core is called an agent, I use 2 computers, that’s a total of 6 cores and it looks like this:

Here the G630 processor works for me around the clock, but the second one starts from time to time, it’s not difficult to calculate how much you can earn if you look at the following figure

That's it, download it, install it, go for it. Everything will work out, the most important thing is that water does not flow under a lying stone.

As you know, competition is the engine of development of any industry, ensuring the most efficient allocation of resources. Perfect competition in the modern world has survived, perhaps, only in one place - on the stock exchanges.

A lot has been said on Habré about what an exchange is and how it differs from a regular market. Read, for example, the IPO for dummies series. I will only note that standardized goods are traded on the stock exchange; buyers and sellers compete only on price.

A commodity on an exchange can be anything: grain, metals, currency, securities, etc. In the form of an exchange, as the most fair and convenient, they trade SEO links, banner displays, and electronic currency. So why not trade in what lies at the heart of the IT industry – computing resources.

What will be taken as a unit of goods? There are several options here. This can be one floating point operation (1 FLOP). Then the process of selling computing resources will look like this: the seller provides the client with some virtual execution environment in which a certain amount of memory, processor cores, and possibly video card resources are available. In this case, there is an interface through which the source data is loaded and the calculation results are returned. Calculations can follow any algorithm written in the form of assembly instructions. Another option involves a larger trading unit, such as 1 Hash. That is, the algorithm by which the hash will be calculated is hard-coded in the software of the exchange’s clients. Only the calculation data and results change. This does not mean that the client will have to send huge amount information. After all, 1 lot on the exchange can be equal to 1 Mhash, the source data is transmitted as a range of values, and the result tells whether a certain pattern string was found among the calculated hashes. This is enough, for example, to implement the mining of those same Bitcoins.

Here the question arises: what will the competition between a computer network built in this way and, for example, the Bitcoin network lead to? The answer may be this: the broader concept does not contradict the narrower one, but includes it, takes it into account as a special case. Thus, if the exchange rate in the global computer network is low, which makes it profitable to mine Bitcoins, several effects will arise at once, restoring the balance. Firstly, an increase in demand for computing in the global computer network will lead to an increase in the exchange rate, secondly, an increase in the supply of Bitcoins will lead to a drop in the value of coins, and thirdly, a purely technical mechanism provided for by the Bitcoin network will work - the complexity of the network will increase and mining will require more computing resources. What if the exchange rate on the global computer network is such that it becomes unprofitable to mine Bitcoins? This will mean only one thing: new, more interesting projects have appeared, and everyone has switched their resources to them. The same applies to the existing AWS, which, unlike the proposed model, is a simple auction in which only buyers compete, and only Amazon is the seller.

Thus, the economically proposed system is quite stable and dynamic. However, two more problems may arise that are of a socio-ethical nature.

The first is that the created system can be used by attackers to guess passwords, RSA keys, etc. But world practice shows that the mere possibility of misuse of a system cannot be a reason for refusing to develop it. After all, there are hosting services, dedicated servers, etc. on the Internet. Their administrators control the use of their resources. And the proposed distributed computer network just does not pretend to be absolute decentralization and anonymity. The exchange is an intermediary in transactions and can verify the integrity of participants.

The second ethical problem is that financial gain may lure away those who participated in free distributed computing projects such as Folding@home, BOINC, SETI@home, etc. But on the other hand, some of these projects have questionable benefits. At the same time, there are many examples in history when purely commercial projects later benefited society.