Comment by neurostimulant
5 years ago
Hold on, so you buy an ad slot, serve your code in that ad slot, AND serve another ad inside that slot to resell? Is that actually allowed by ads provider?
The idea of running vm inside an ad to harvest compute from unsuspecting visitors... I think this might accelerate widespread use of adblockers even more if you successfully deploy this in the wild because people will notice ads are getting heavier.
> Hold on, so you buy an ad slot, serve your code in that ad slot, AND serve another ad inside that slot to resell?
Exactly.
> Is that actually allowed by ads provider?
On some ad networks it's prohibited by ToS and (in some cases) a review process, but it is extremely difficult to prevent in practice, especially if you have any understanding of how this works. I estimate perhaps as much as 50-90% of Google's adsense revenue comes from this, so they aren't (directly) incentivized to stop it.
> The idea of running vm inside an ad to harvest compute from unsuspecting visitors... I think this might accelerate widespread use of adblockers even more if you successfully deploy this in the wild because people will notice ads are getting heavier.
Perhaps, but people also have a lot of idle cores, so if you don't block networking and you monitor system performance carefully to ensure you don't affect things, for the most part people simply won't notice.
Quite a few people have been caught out doing wasteful things like trying to generate "coin", which definitely doesn't help, but there's also some interesting applications that have been run on volunteer-cpu-time (folding, seti, etc), so it seems plausible with some charitable examples and some care to avoid impact, this might be a doer?