cryptomining
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White House proposes 30 percent tax on electricity used for crypto mining
The Biden administration wants to impose a 30 percent tax on the electricity used by cryptocurrency mining operations, and it has included the proposal in its budget for the fiscal year of 2024.
Most new NVIDIA RTX gaming GPUs will be crypto-limited
NVIDIA is extending its limits on GPU capacity to more GeForce RTX 30-series cards in a bid to limit the shortages caused by cryptomining.
Supercomputers across Europe have fallen to cryptomining hacks
Supercomputers around Europe have fallen prey to cryptomining hacks in the past week, and there are signs there might be a common attacker.
New York power plant mines Bitcoin using excess energy
A natural gas power plant can't always send excess energy into the grid, frequently leading to waste as the gas is flared or vented away. However, a plant in Dresden, New York thinks it has a solution: use that surplus to generate some digital cash. Greenidge Generation has revealed that it's using "behind-the-meter" energy at the facility to mine Bitcoin, with 7,000 mining systems producing up to 5.5BTC (about $45,000 as of this writing) per day.
The first in-the-wild BlueKeep cyberattack isn't as dangerous as feared
When word broke of the BlueKeep vulnerability in Windows, many feared a repeat of NotPetya and other widespread worms that have wreaked havoc. They might not have to worry quite so much, though. Kryptos Logic has discovered the first known in-the-wild BlueKeep exploit, and it isn't as vicious as feared. The initial attack from a "low-level actor" appears to have scanned the internet and infected vulnerable systems with a cryptocurrency miner, but little else. There are no data wipes, no automatic spreading or other signs of a worm in action.
Firefox is about to get much, much faster
Firefox got speedy last year when its Quantum browser rolled out -- now it's set to get even faster. The latest release rolling out today prioritizes its performance management "to-do" list with a set of features that'll load pages up to 40-80 percent quicker. The browser will now suspend idle tabs, delay lesser-used scripts and skip unnecessary work during start-ups.
Firefox will soon protect you against crypto-mining scripts
At a time when every high-profile data breach sheds more light on how web activity is monitored, Firefox is launching anti-tracking tools to protect against fingerprinting and crypto-mining. Mozilla is again teaming up with Disconnect -- a software company that provides no-tracking software and whose ad tracker blocklist Firefox already utlizes for its tracking protections -- on the new tools. Both of the blocking methods are available to Firefox Nightly 68 and Beta 67 testers. Mozilla plans to enable them by default in a future release.
Firefox will soon block ad trackers by default
Mozilla has for years let you stop ad trackers from collecting your data, and, soon, Firefox will block them by default. The browser will also give you more control over the data you share with websites.
