Norton is being blasted for adding a difficult to remove mining software to its software.
The opt-in tool was announced back in June and was designed to make it easy for users to use leftover processing power to mine ether. The feature only works with the most powerful graphics cards.
The company is skimming 15 percent of the generated currency and has full control over its customers' wallet as well. Netizens were appalled when the feature surfaced.
Doctorow wrote that this was fuckin wild. Norton has sneakily installed software on your computer that can be used to mine gold.
Users may lose money using the tool if they pay too much for power.
Chris Vickery, a security researcher, said thatNorton is making a ton of profit while costing their customers more in electricity use than they make.
He said it was disgusting, gross, and brand-suicide.
uninstall wizard
Maxius pointed out that theNortonCrypto tool gets automatically installed on systems without much of a dialogue during the install of its security product.
They wrote that there was no way to prevent it from installing on your system.
PCMag reports thatNorton hasn't confirmed if it is planning to make it easier for users to uninstall it.
The company told PCMag thatNorton is an opt-in feature and not enabled without user permission. If users no longer want to use the feature, it can be disabled throughNorton 360.
You won't be able to mine it anyways once the ethereum blockchain transitions to a proof-of-stake model.
There is a hard-to-Delete coin miner.
More on mining: The founder of Mozilla was horrified by the browser foray.
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