At the surface level, it's an attack on Krebs, but there's a secondary thing going on here.
Krebs' main investigation was on Coinhive, a group which embeds Monero mining scripts in pages which run on page visitors' machines. But in his criticism of Coinhive and its association with Pr0gramm, it seems he may have cast too wide a net, doxxing and accusing Pr0gramm users who may not have anything to do with Coinhive. Instead of apologizing for this, he doubled down on it, typifying Pr0gramm users as basement dwellers who anonymously post nastygrams and threaten journalists with death.
Donating to cancer research is a direct response to that: it shows that Pr0gramm users are at least not only bad--they also do things generally considered altruistic, like donating to cancer research.
Both sides have definitely dirtied their hands: at least some Pr0gramm users are mining cryptocurrency on other people's machines through Coinhive, and Krebs has definitely made the false insinuation that Monero's anonymity is only useful for criminal activity. The open question is whether this behavior is typical of Pr0gramm or Krebs has actually accused Pr0gramm users who weren't involved in Coinhive.
I don't know who is in the right here--I simply don't have enough information to know. What information I do have comes from sources which are clearly biased. But it's interesting to see how even at this level, security cases are being tried in the court of public opinion.
I definitely think that mining cryptocurrency on other people's machines without their consent is malicious, and I am glad that the security industry is treating this as an exploit. This shares similarities with ads in webpages, which run without my consent.
However, unlike ads, mining scripts don't grab my attention without my consent, they only use my processing power, which is something I would be willing to negotiate for the right website. I'd be happy to click a button which says "Allow nytimes.com to mine cryptocurrency on your browser while you browse their website", for example. There would need to be secure systems in place around this sort of mechanism--I'd rather have this implemented by the browser than as a JS script--but this might provide an alternative to pay models which sites seem unwilling to try, and ad models which I am unwilling to agree to.
The users of the platform are not the people who include Coinhive on hacked websites. Pr0gramm simply allowed its users to voluntarily mine in their browsers and be rewarded with a premium account. The main benefit of a premium account is, that no ads are shown on the site.
Ya know, I wonder if poeple hat agree to this have made comments online about global warming and how serious a threat it is, and how dirty deniers are stupidbadpeople?
Because being proCrypto in my mind, is just like that same type of hippy type being anti-nuclear, just with more irony and ignorance.
And I’m not someone that believes 1/2 the gloom and doom, just that I like the hypocrisy of “climate informed” types being pro-crypto which is the biggest waste of power we’ve ever made.
I don't know any particulars of this specific situation, but I would caution folks against accepting this sort of claim at face value. The GamerGate "movement" sprinkled donations to charity in with telling women that they wanted to rape and kill them. There are gradations here.
The point which Pr0gramm users are making is that the Pr0gramm users donating to cancer research and the Pr0gramm users mining through Coinhive might be different people, and lumping them together because they all use Pr0gramm would be unfair (this is the argument they're making--I don't know whether it's true).
- publishing material by users he knew had trolled him to further the agenda that this is a right-wing site (it is not, the site has a huge fan base of Bernie Sanders and other leftist politicians)
- look at his tweets and headlines (on Vice Motherboard for example) that are used to promote the story: They are almost exclusively focusing the the Mathias Moench part, which is completely irrelevant to pr0gramm, Coinhive, and even the mindmap.
Given that, his whole article reeks of sensationalism, not journalism. This is fake news. Seeing reporters report about a thing you know well instills me with me with dread about how I believe their articles about the things I don't know well. I lost all the respect I had for Mr. Krebs work, and I am one step closer to losing respect for all journalists. Which isn't a bad thing, being aware how biased and badly researched publications are is not a bad thing.
€dit: typos
sounds great to push the story. Except that it could not be farther from the truth. I just wasn't expecting someone who calls themselves an investigative journalist like Brian Krebs to try to beat the Sun (or Bild, for Germany) at their game.
Am Abend änderte sich die Auseinandersetzung dann, nachdem ein Nutzer, "BassT87", einen Screenshot als Beleg für eine 25-Euro-Spende an die Krebshilfe postete. "Ich habe den Rummel um Herrn Krebs mal zum Anlass genommen, meinen Teil gegen Krebs beizutragen. Vielleicht macht der ein oder andere es ja (statt dem drölftausendsten Meme) ja nach...".
In english:
In the evening, the dispute changed after a user, "BassT87", posted a screenshot as proof of a 25 euro donation to Krebshilfe. "I took the hype about Mr. Krebs as an opportunity to do my part against cancer[Krebs]. Maybe one or the other will (instead of the thrwelvethousandth meme) imitate it...".
This is really the kind of absurd humour I like...
(Edit: format)
This is apparently in protest of this article by Krebs: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/03/who-and-what-is-coinhive...
Which according to some screenshots on pr0gramm also contains bullshit users fed to Krebs in an attempt to toll him. [0]
But the obvious problem here is the unnecessary doxing of people, just because Brian doesn't believe someone can compile a CPU miner with emscripten as one single person.
Edit: are they DDoSsing or donating? If the former, than it's even worse form. Had my hopes up for a second. The article talks about a failing site because of many donations, but other replies here about DDoS.
They're getting back at Krebs by donating to a charity?
They're not (intentionally) DDOSing the charity. The charity's website is simply overloaded from visitors seeking to donate.
The charity's slogan is "Cancer (Krebs) is one of the worst problems of our time". So I guess it makes sense. Somehow.
It's the sort of passive-egressive altruism that quite elegantly straddles the divide of childishness and maturity.
