App with cryptocurrency miner removed from the Mac App Store
The miner was not hidden and asked for permission from the user, in exchange for premium features. But two bugs caused unexpected operation and forced the developer to retrace his steps.
Calendar 2, a popular application on the Mac App Store, has been the target of harsh criticism over the past few days because its developer has integrated a crypto-mines miner (Monero) that does not work as intended.
Qbix, the company that develops Calendar 2, has recently inserted in the app a piece of code for mining Monero: unlike of what happens with the occult criptominer that are plaguing the network during this period, the miner present within Calendar 2 must be explicitly authorized by the user and the same Qbix does not hide the presence of the integrated miner in the app.
The activation of the miner is proposed as a form of compensation to unlock advanced features of the program: the user can then choose whether to use the program with the basic features, or use the advanced features by paying a fee or letting the integrated miner make the his job.
As ArsTechnica elaborates, Gregory Magarshak, founder of Qbix, said that the debut of the integrated miner did not go as planned, due to two bugs that prevented the correct functioning of the mechanism. The first of the two problems led the miner to operate indefinitely, even if the user disables it from the program settings.
The second bug has instead led the miner to exploit more resources than expected: the developers have determined a use between 10% and 20% of the free computational capacities of the processor (depending on whether the system is connected to the power supply or not) , but in the reality of the facts, the miner goes to consume more resources than established.
What happened inevitably raised a fuss on social media, so that Magarshak quickly returned to his feet by removing the miner in the latest version of the app and stating that he no longer wanted to beat this path.
Magarshak explained that the company that provided the mining library does not release the source code, and it would take too much time to solve the problem of excessive exploitation of the CPU, recognizing that the two problems encountered during the launch phase have caused an erroneous perception in the public of the intent of Qbix, which from the beginning wanted to make the operations of mining transparent and only with the consent of the user. ” We could have solved the situation from a technical point of view and continue to benefit from mining, but we wanted to consider what happened as a signal that led us to call ourselves out of mining, ” said Magarshak.
Meanwhile, the app is no longer available on the Mac App Store, but it is unclear whether it was removed from Qbix or if Apple intervened.
