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Comment by aspenmayer | Hacker News Reader

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aspenmayer·

(July 2021)

https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announ...

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Review:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/cryptocurrency/hands-o...

+ It's opt-in

+ It's easy to use

- 36 hours of running it did not result in a "single penny" (see review for details, may have changed now)

- Uses 100% of the GPU capacity when the GPU is ~idle, with no way of adjusting the mining rate

- 15% mining fee

Does it tell you how much extra electricity you're using?

How could it know?

Edit: It would actually be nice if the PSU (and all of the various subsystems, like the GPU) were required to measure the power usage and report it to the OS. I'm sure one of those ATX pins could be repurposed to include signalling, somehow.

Most GPUs have power sensors that can be read from software. Even if they don't, they could make an estimate based on the model of the GPU.

Considering they market it as "PC's idle time into cash", I don't think they're much interested in telling you that you're in fact burning through electricity to make Norton money.

Is it opt-in, though? The twitter post said it’s impossible to disable and the FAQ literally does not have a single question on “how can I disable it?”.

The screenshots from [1] shows it saying "Turn your PC's idle time into cash. Show me how". Would that make sense if you had no choice in the matter? And on the second screenshot it has "Pause mining" button.

[1] from: https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announ...

See also https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v... seems clearly opt-in.

WTF. If not for the domain (and month) I'd assume that was some April Fool's joke.

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