Hacker News

New stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. DNS Honeypots Don't Fail at Banners,They Fail at the Protocol(medium.com/meetcyber ↗)
    discuss
  2. Open Weights Are Good. Open Source Is Better(opensource.org ↗)
    discuss
  3. The senior engineer death spiral(sunilpai.dev ↗)
    discuss
  4. Show HN: The meal planner that gets all your dishes ready at once(robotrecipes.co ↗)
    discuss
  5. Your robotic vacuum is a witness: evidence, privacy and the law(theconversation.com ↗)
    1comments
  6. Poster Prompts One hundred design styles as copy-paste prompts(john.hartnup.uk ↗)
    discuss
  7. Show HN: Stardrift – A 3D galaxy of all music, to explore and learn(gerlach.dev ↗)
    discuss
  8. Bingel(bingel.se ↗)
    discuss
  9. The right way to learn from Genghis Khan(economist.com ↗)
    discuss
  10. How A Chinese Hacking Firm Tapped AI to Supercharge Cyber-Spying(wsj.com ↗)
    discuss
  11. Turning the iPhone Duo Hinge into an Accordion(reddit.com ↗)
    discuss
  12. Trump Announces an 'AI Force'(wsj.com ↗)
    discuss
  13. When Does AI Stop Needing Us?(acm.org ↗)
    discuss
  14. Show HN: Video Size Reducer – compress video in the browser for sharing(videosizereducer.net ↗)
    discuss
  15. More Than Music with MIDI and Processing(mand.is ↗)
    1comments
  16. Freeze Drying(wikipedia.org ↗)
    discuss
  17. Which stories about academia matter?(donmoynihan.substack.com ↗)
    discuss
  18. Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI and others made illegal agreement on AI slowdown(apnews.com ↗)
    discuss
  19. AI Is Just Greg – Inside an AI Datacenter [video](youtube.com ↗)
    1comments
  20. Nowhere Air – Get a first class ticket to nowhere(nowhereair.com ↗)
    discuss
  21. Free calculators, no tracking client-side(getutilary.com ↗)
    discuss
  22. Do you remember the Harvard student Eldo Kim?(cnn.com ↗)
    discuss
  23. Running a business made me hate capitalism – Go Make Things(gomakethings.com ↗)
    discuss
  24. Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'(tomshardware.com ↗)
    discuss
  25. OpenDTC – Read ya Diagnostic codes with no ads n that(opendtc.net ↗)
    1comments
  26. Jev vs. XGBoost and Bert(explainx.ai ↗)
    discuss
  27. Trump says he will create 'AI Force,' name AI czar(reuters.com ↗)
    discuss
  28. ChatGPT Rogue-Emailed the FBI(reddit.com ↗)
    discuss
  29. M6 Pro Chip Result on Geekbench Is Likely Fake(macrumors.com ↗)
    discuss
  30. Making a Jumping Cube Stick the Landing [video](youtube.com ↗)
    discuss

Is startpage.com mining Bitcoin when you open it?

1 pointsby 6h ago
3 comments
open startpage.com and it will display "verifying your request" and for 30 seconds, it will bump the CPU usage to high on all cores.

so what the page doing by using all cpu power just to check what? this is mining behaviour and this started a few weeks ago, since I noticed. other people have noticed it too and said they would not use it anymore because they have to wait +-30 seconds to get some results.

did they announce it? could not find anything about that.

anyway, I won't use it anymore because 30 seconds of CPU usage is an abuse.

not everytime is 30 seconds, it must detect that has used CPU before and sometimes is only a few seconds.

I would understand this issue if they put it right on the page "we will do some mining for you to use our service..." or something like that.

to reproduce, open first a task monitor where you can check the CPU usage, then open the startpage dot com page and see how the CPU bumps into hyperspace!

maybe they are just cleaning the dust on the CPU fan, and that is good for you, right?

5h agoHN ↗

Doubtful. You’re not going to mine a bitcoin in 30 seconds.

It’s been pretty popular lately to utilize a proof of work problem to deter AI scrapers. This is likely what you’re seeing.

Anubis is the one I’ve seen most often, but not the only one. https://github.com/techaroHQ/anubis

5h agoHN ↗

Thanks, but makes no sense to use 100% of the CPU power on the browser just to detect or stop AI scrapers?

Let's use all the power of a CPU during 30 seconds and save humanity from AI crap. Makes no sense at all.

Let's also make people wait 30 seconds to type something to search. People will just stop using this crap.

Thank you for your tip but this is beyong stupid. Let me just add startpage to blocked domains list.

Thanks again.

1h agoHN ↗

It has ramped up over time, it used to be just a few seconds was enough. You’re right that it’s unsustainable and annoying.