What's wrong with some companies making money?
While I can imagine for most this is unimportant / non-news, I want to suggest a few cases where the process could be as bad or worse than malware:
- Reduced life - Devices that don't get adequate cooling can be damaged by running at 100% all the time. As Ghacks the article notes "whether mining is profitable depends on a number of factors, including the cost of electricity but also wear and tear of the hardware (source)."
- Battery issues - Although I'd assume these programs run in a reduced state on battery, if for whatever reason the software isn't aware the system is running on battery, the program will both kill the battery and reduce the overall life.
- Waste heat - Running these programs during the summer means you pay twice: once for the electricity to power your hardware and again for the air conditioning necessary to cool it down. It's easily possible that it ends up cheaper to just buy the commercial software program versus all the extra electricity charges.
- Pointless - Hardware not suited for "mining" tasks are wildly inefficient, meaning you spend many hours worth of electricity for very little gain. Devices with low "floating point" processor capabilities common in video cards are especially weak. Notably, the Norton option seems to be aware of this and includes minimum system requirements, but it's unlikely other programs will know or care.
- Performance issues - Norton is one of the antivirius tools that has seen criticism for "heavy slowdown during full scans." (pcworld) I'd be very surprised if it didn't slow down even more with this process. After all, searching your computer for problems isn't actively making them money.
How does that affect portablefreeware.com?
This is not policy, this is just my perspective. For my part, I'll be trying to integrate a more thorough testing processes to make sure free software doesn't include these processes.
And because of the issues mentioned above, I plan to treat programs like this as malware.
How do I prevent these types of programs?
Ideally download from reputable sources or run programs like CryptoPrevent. While it was intended to prevent cryptojacking, this program could represent one security group block crypto programs enabled by other security software. Which is bizarre.
Related
- FAQ - Types of software (freeware, spyware, malware, etc.)
- Addressing malware
- About Comodo products and privacy issues
- Sourceforge and suspicions of driveby malware