With the popularity of cryptocurrency mining growing astronomically over the course of the last year, it was inevitable that certain websites and individuals would take advantage of the situation.
As we reported back in September, The Pirate Bay faced a great deal of controversy over its implementation of a hidden cryptocurrency mining script within the website's JavaScript code, taking advantage of visitors' computing power without their consent.
Though this practice is far from the norm, there are still several sites – including Showtime's own website, briefly – that implement similar scripts.
Unfortunate as the situation is, you aren't without recourse if you'd prefer not to have your system's resources sapped without your approval. Numerous browser extensions and add-ons already exist for Firefox and Google Chrome that prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Although extensions are certainly better than nothing, you can't beat official support. To that end, Opera browser users are getting anti-cryptocurrency mining features in the form of an official update as reported by TechCrunch.
"We are fans of cryptocurrencies, but we simply don't accept that websites are using people's computers to mine coins without their knowledge or consent," head of Opera's Desktop Browser Krystian Kolondra said. "With the new Opera 50, we want to kick off 2018 by providing people a simple way to regain control of their computers."
This method of regaining control is, indeed, simple. If you're an Opera user, all you have to do after installing the latest browser update is tick a box called "NoCoin" under your browser's "block ads" settings section.
If Opera's NoCoin feature proves to be both successful and effective, it wouldn't be surprising to see other major browsers adopt similar functionality down the line.