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posted by
Dopefish
on Monday February 17 2014, @10:00AM
from the government-should-mind-their-own-business dept.
from the government-should-mind-their-own-business dept.
mattie_p writes "MIT students won a hackathon last November with a non-functioning demo of Tidbit. The concept is to replace web advertising revenue with a tiny amount of Bitcoin mining on the user's browser. Out of the blue, the students were hit by a subpoena from the New Jersey Attorney General demanding that the founders 'turn over sensitive information including source codes, hosting websites, and all of the Bitcoin wallet addresses associated with Tidbit.'
At first MIT council referred the students to legal assistance from the EFF, who quickly came to their defense. Now there is a petition going around requesting the MIT administration support the students directly. Parallels are being drawn to Aaron Swartz, possibly because one of the authors of the recent petition is Prof. Hal Ableson, although details of the two cases have very little in common.
MIT President Reif has now come out strongly in support of the students--and in favor of academic freedom from interference by government."
At first MIT council referred the students to legal assistance from the EFF, who quickly came to their defense. Now there is a petition going around requesting the MIT administration support the students directly. Parallels are being drawn to Aaron Swartz, possibly because one of the authors of the recent petition is Prof. Hal Ableson, although details of the two cases have very little in common.
MIT President Reif has now come out strongly in support of the students--and in favor of academic freedom from interference by government."
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MIT Students Subpoenaed Over Tidbit
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 5, Interesting) by clone141166 on Monday February 17 2014, @10:10AM
Makes me glad that SoylentNews.org can function without having to run javascript... no sneaky background bitcoin miners around here :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by githaron on Monday February 17 2014, @10:42AM
What is wrong with Tidbit? It sounds like an awesome idea. Instead of trading your screen real estate (ads) and privacy for content, it allows website developers to consider a third option: clock cycles for content. Of course, some greedy websites will probably try to have ads, privacy selling, and Bitcoin mining. I could also see there being other computing networks like research clusters trying the same thing.
(Score: 1) by clone141166 on Monday February 17 2014, @11:01AM
I think Tidbit is an interesting idea, I was more just pointing out that with every new technology comes the potential for good and the potential for evil...
(Score: 1) by mmcmonster on Monday February 17 2014, @11:27AM
As an opt-in, I have no problems with this.
ESPECIALLY for a news website such as this. Imagine the option: "As a valuable member of our community, would you like to choose the option of in-browser bitcoin mining while you are viewing this site on this computer instead of viewing adds?
(Score: 2, Informative) by omoc on Monday February 17 2014, @01:09PM
I'm with my laptop on battery ~80% of the time I read news. I want neither ads nor javascript running. However, I would not object to pay for a LWN like revenue model if the website delivers.
(Score: 1) by Keldrin on Monday February 17 2014, @06:05PM
I agree. I'm in favor of having lots of options when it comes to supporting a website I enjoy. However, I would have a problem if this became mandatory. As I'm sure a lot of us are, I am quite paranoid when it comes to letting code run on my machine. If I'm forced to run code that I don't have time to examine, I'm far more likely to use a different service. Besides, letting a website hog computing power may cause instability with other applications, and I don't relish the idea of having my computer lock up just because I was playing a windowed game while surfing the net.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tftp on Monday February 17 2014, @07:07PM
"As a valuable member of our community, would you like to choose the option of in-browser bitcoin mining while you are viewing this site on this computer instead of viewing adds?
The loss of performance and waste of energy would be incomparable with the benefit of mining at least one µBTC. It may well be that the web site operators do not care, since the service comes for free to them, but society-wise it looks like a very poor investment of power. BTC mining is marginally cost-effective on ASIC miners today... The Tidbit Web site says this:
Is it worth messing up with 1 BILLION computers to earn measly $2.50? What will you spend in bandwidth serving that Javascript? I bet just that alone will put you deep into red.
As other people mentioned, too many today browse from mobile platforms, where power is at premium, and CPU clocks are dialed down to the bare minimum.
OT: <sup> tags do not work. They have very low potential for evil, IMO, and should be allowed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Random2 on Monday February 17 2014, @11:50AM
Would trading ads for bitcoin mining really be a bad thing? If the site (and the user) know what's coming ahead of time it's so much easier to contain; the main problem with ads is that they're completely arbitrary code that can't be verified until it's on the machine. Excluding people finding ways to hijack the ad and deliver malware, this seems like a much safer option.
Of course, I'm quite happy that soylent doesn't need Javascript either, but I wouldn't necessarily mind something like this replacing ads.
If only I registered 3 users earlier....
(Score: 1) by carguy on Monday February 17 2014, @02:11PM
Thanks to mattie_p for scraping my draft of this story off the forum and posting it (with some bonus editing as well). For whatever reason, I couldn't submit stories this morning.
I also think Tidbit is a cool idea, of course with some possibility of misuse. Will try to keep SoyLent posted if there are any developments in the court case -- which might turn into Chris Christie vs. MIT.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Monday February 17 2014, @02:12PM
My objections to advertisements are:
1) They are intellectual offensive and devoid of all positive value towards society. Advertisements are produced via the art of deception, aka, marketing. The secondary effect being the progressive erosion of our privacy to make marketing more efficient and ever present in every moment of our lives. Marketing respects nothing, and no moment is sacred or off limits to them.
2) Marketers are the biggest whiny entitled bitches that have no problems purchasing corrupt politicians to make it illegal to bypass them. The concept of you controlling what you see and when is an anathema to them. Only marketers, and the forces they represent, made the argument that skipping commercials is "stealing" their IP. An argument so ridiculous and intellectually offensive that it is only exceeded by the fact it worked in courts. 3) The big huge gaping security hole that has turned a lot of machines into whimpering gaping orifices to be used at will by cyber crime minded individuals.
4) The ridiculous amount of bandwidth and resources wasted on it.
I would in two seconds flat agree to run a crypto mining algorithm in my browser and allow SoylentNews the benefit of some of my processing power in exchange for none of the above offenses.
That's an awesome idea and I'm not so fanatically opposed to JS anyways. It's a client-side architecture. That's it. It serves a purpose. Whether or not it's used correctly or efficiently is another discussion entirely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2014, @02:26PM
I can't check the availability of my /. nick without JavaScript.
I also can't just go ahead and register regardless, getting some utterly meaningless error message.
So I'm not sure where you get "SoylentNews.org can function without having to run javascript" from?
(And yes, I've posted to the bugs story.)