At this point I'm convinced that the entire antivirus industry is a scam scheme for the most part. They make everyone suffer for their own profit.<p>Users are scared into installing this crap and paying recurring payments for it, and then the performance of their computer goes to shit. Developers are given nightmares by having their software misdetected as a virus or broken by the antivirus changing the OS behavior in unexpected ways.
The idle cycles on your CPU in<p>2000s : aid search for extra terrestrials<p>2010s : help search for cancer cures<p>2020s : help planet incinerating ponzi grifters (h/t: jwz)
Norton has outright been a malware company for a long time<p>I'd love to see the feds arrest a few people there and destroy the company.<p>Just remember. Don't ever hire someone with recent Norton experience I their resume. I'd sooner fill that gap in with the explanation that I was selling fentanyl laced products on the dark web
This is so absurdly disgusting, there's nothing more to it. The whole thing boggles my mind but the FAQ is just on another level, here's one example:<p>Q: Will I be able to adjust the settings thresholds, or will Norton decide that?<p>A: For now, Norton will manage the settings. We are continuing to build capabilities and could potentially make the settings adjustable for you in the future.<p>Like, I know ~1.5m people still pay for AOL [1] but this is criminal.<p>[1]<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-still-pay-for-service-but-not-for-dial-up-internet.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-s...</a>
Even from a pro-crypto standpoint this offering is somewhat problematic:<p>> Once earned, they can track their earnings in their Norton Crypto Wallet, which is stored in the cloud so it cannot be lost due to hard drive failure.<p>From <a href="https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announcements/introducing-norton-crypto" rel="nofollow">https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announ...</a><p>So your "earnings", meager as they likely will be, aren't even properly given to you.<p>Not to mention it seems unlikely that a consumer-grade machine is going to earn enough from its share of mining to cover the energy costs. At this point you have to have some kind of extra-cheap energy source to be able to compete in mining. Although some people (e.g. me) have a flat-rate electricity bill with their apartment, so maybe some could take some advantage.
Important note, because it isn't immediately obvious: Norton is bundling an <i>optional</i> cryptocurrency miner that they are offering as a product. Nothing here indicates that Norton is surreptitiously adding cryptominer malware on their customers' machines (like one might assume reading the original thread.) Though they are taking a 15% cut for using their miner...[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announcements/introducing-norton-crypto" rel="nofollow">https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announ...</a>
This is not satire. Norton actually thinks it is a good idea for anti-virus software to have a cryptocurrency miner installed too. whilst also taking a 15% mining fee off of the work!<p>This is beyond a scam at this point. Is that why closed-source anti-virus software is a scam as well since they can install any sort of malware when they want to or allow it to run without doing anything?<p>The anti-virus is the virus.
I'm surprised there isn't any math in this thread on how much they stand to make with this, so I'll try with a bit of napkin math.<p>NortonLifeLock reported 21M customers in 2021, with 60% using Norton 360 (presumably the rest are using their identity theft products?) so let's call that 12.6 million computers (ignoring multi-computer licenses for simplicity.) You're not going to mine any Ethereum on a CPU, so let's assume we only care about GPUs. Let's say that 20% of users have a PC with a GPU suitable for mining any ETH at all, and within that 20% they have an average of 6GB graphics cards. The internet claims that a 6GB graphics card will average around 26 MH/s for Ethereum, which would have earned $38 in the last month of mining. Assuming Norton gets 25% of users to activate this (which seems high to me) we have around (25% of users activated)*($38 worth of ETH mined/month per gaming PC)*(20% of all PCs are gaming PCs)*(15% Norton pool fees)*(12.6M installed Norton copies) = 0.25*38*0.2*0.15*12.6 = $3.6 million per month, or $43.2 million in profit per year. If they enabled this for everyone I imagine they could easily get into the hundreds of millions of dollars of pure profit per year range.<p>However, mining on a mid-range graphics card typically isn't profitable once you factor in electricity and the decreased lifespan of the graphics card. So while this is making huge profits for Norton, it's likely costing the users money if they enable it. At $0.10/kWh and 15% pool fees, you're negative on the majority of gaming PCs, and deeply negative on every single non-gaming PC.<p>Pretty scummy move.
I'd imagine a machine infected with Norton isn't even a good environment to mine crypto; it's already wasting it's resources on the rest of the bloat in that product.
On top of it all they had the audacity to set the mining pool fee to 15% with no option for alternative pools. (for ref mining pool fees are generally 1-3%)
wow, I just bought my fiancée a gaming laptop and it came preinstalled with Norton—I didn't uninstall it right away because I predicted it would be a pain, but now I'm going to do that first thing after work today. people like my dad still go out of their way to install Norton on every computer they get their hands on—just a few years ago I built my mom a cheap simple desktop to dump her photos onto, and one day she told me it was really slow all of the sudden, so I checked it out and lo and behold my dad had installed Norton on it and it had made everything molasses-slow. kind of sad to see this once-respected software suite stooping to these levels.
At that point you may as well skip the antivirus and go straight to a shady Russian download site. The result will be the same, but at least you won't be paying for the miner.
"The key to the wallet is encrypted and stored securely in the cloud. Only you have access to the wallet."<p><a href="https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announcements/introducing-norton-crypto" rel="nofollow">https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announ...</a>
It's just a classic gift card balance exploit. From GSD-2022-1000002 (<a href="https://github.com/cloudsecurityalliance/gsd-database/blob/main/2022/1000xxx/GSD-2022-1000002.json" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cloudsecurityalliance/gsd-database/blob/m...</a>)<p>Norton AntiVirus now includes an Ethereum crypto miner that has several problems including deceptive rewards program and difficulty in uninstalling it.<p>Norton keeps 15% of all Ethereum mining proceeds and "pays" the remainder into a users "Norton Crypto Wallet" which is hosted by Norton. It should be noted that the Norton Crypto Wallet cannot be used to make Ethereum transactions, but can only be used to transfer value to a Coinbase account once a certain minimum threshold of value is accrued. The Norton crypto mining and Norton Crypto Wallet are effectively a gift card system where the money can be withdrawn, but not unless a certain balance is available. It should also be noted that the Norton Crypto mining software is reportedly very difficult to uninstall, requiring administrative level privileges, and even then reports indicate effective removal is difficult.
Not to defend this practice at all, but when I was looking into crypto mining a fair bit ago, the bar to entry was quite large even for someone in the tech space. There didn't seem to be a simple app you just download and start. You have to know a lot of stuff. I don't know why more companies haven't come out and made crypto mining easier for the masses who just use apps but don't make them. It seems like low hanging fruit. There could be something available now...I haven't really researched as I'm not really passionate about this space and seemed more trouble than it was worth to get started with the time I was willing to put in. I just thought it was odd that there wasn't something with a simple interface you could just hit "mine" with maybe a couple of radio button options and away you go. I'm sure we will see a lot more larger/mainstream companies dipping their toes in, maybe even at the OS level to capitalize on it. There <i>is</i> a market for it and I'm guessing it's quite large, probably larger than the current crypto market which is kind of niche, just likely not many potential customers in the HN type crowd.
OMG this is a legitimate thing:<p>> <a href="https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announcements/introducing-norton-crypto" rel="nofollow">https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-service-announ...</a><p>As if AV software doesn't slow down PCs enough as it is, they thought adding a crypto-miner would be a good idea to finish the job and turn them into fully rated space-heaters.
I haven't run Windows in any serious capacity in about 11 years now, but even in 2010 or so, it was pretty rare that I ever got viruses on my computer (even with all the trips to torrent websites to download TOTALLY LEGAL STUFF).<p>I've been running Linux or Mac since then, and due to their lower userbase there tends to be fewer viruses (as far as I understand it), but I would have to assume that Windows has gotten more secure and less virusey than it was 11 years ago? I don't think anyone I know even uses antivirus anymore. Maybe I'm mistaken.<p>All that said, I've thought Norton Antivirus was a bloated piece of shit piece of software even when computer viruses <i>were</i> a problem for me. I guess them installing a crypto miner is just further proof of that.
No removal option for this "feature". It's funny how anti-virus stuff looks like virus stuff.<p>You can however "pause" the mining forever while keeping everything installed which is what support will suggest if you ask.
I wonder what some universities and companies who still rely on Norton licenses across the board will have to say about this at the end of the month when their electricity bill comes.
I'm pretty ignorant about this stuff but when proof of stake comes around won't there be no need for this mining pool at all? I thought under proof of stake you're just validating transactions instead of actually finding a hash, which doesn't require a big pool of workers. Seems weird for them to focus on ETH rather than BTC or something else.
Gonna die from irony. For years Norton and other AV vendors have been harassing Bitcoin users by falsely identifying their intentionally installed Bitcoin node software as a malicious cryptocurrency miner (and, no, it doesn't do that). Now they're installing their own miner.
Huh, Norton is still alive and selling? Wow, I was done with it in early WinXP times after I had to format drive because uninstalling Norton Security permanently crashed OS. To below the bottom we go!
This, right here, is blatant theft, and unauthorized utilization of consumer resources. I don't care if there is a clause in there about "You consent to blahblahblah."
Firewalls and offline networks are a better line of defense than antivirus tools.<p>If a virus is on your system it is already too late for the tool to do anything.
"Norton is installing a Cryptocurrency miner" sounds like when 10-15 years back it made the news when one app or one OS installed adware or spyware. We did nothing, and now it is becoming the norm.
If that's the trend, then, ladies and gentlemen, we're screwed: every piece of software will attempt to monetize from user's hardware, no matter the cost, particularly when cost is on the users. Name one reason why they shouldn't do that, there's no law forbidding it except common sense.<p>Cryptocurrency is cancer. It doesn't scale, it can't scale, it's becoming a huge unsustainable environmental disgrace, and it's the #1 reason why certain hardware is harder to find and overpriced, followed by energy, of which we have plenty but decided to waste it in mining farms.<p>Here are some numbers, just look at the trend: from 77 TWh to 204 TWh in one single year.<p><a href="https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/" rel="nofollow">https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/</a><p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-mining-electricity-usage-more-than-google-2021-9?r=US&IR=T" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-mining-electricity-u...</a><p>Now just picture what will be like 5 years from now with possibly one PWh of miners worldwide pumping heat in the atmosphere 24/7, and energy prices skyrocketing because it will always be allocated to this task, therefore demand will always be higher than offer. Seriously, WTF!<p>Of course I expect downvotes from users with vested interest in cryptocurrencies, however I politely ask others to reply with "You're wrong because ..." followed by a believable explanation. I <i>want</i> to be proven wrong on this.