#Norton antivirus softwear software#
#Norton antivirus softwear code#

#Norton antivirus softwear software#

And, of course, there’s the elephant in the room: anyone using Norton’s software to mine has already paid the company a subscription fee for its security software….

However, the fees are usually closer to 1 or 2 percent, which is obviously significantly lower. They wrote that Norton’s 15% fees were much higher than most crypto-mining pool aggregators, observing that “Pool operators do often take a cut or fee for bringing everyone together. Writers for The Verge debunked the worst scare-myths about Norton’s move into using its customers’ computer and electricity bills for crypto-mining, but were concerned about the high fees charged by Norton. The company states, “If users have turned on Norton Crypto but no longer wish to use the feature, it can be deleted through Norton 360 by temporarily shutting off 'tamper protection' (which allows users to modify the Norton installation) and deleting NCrypt.exe from your computer.” Turning it off seems relatively simple as well. You would need to turn the tool on if you wanted to use it.

#Norton antivirus softwear code#

Norton claims to be offering this tool as a way to help customers improve security by providing trusted mining tools and avoiding “Unvetted code on their machines that could be skimming from the earnings or even planting ransomware.”ĭespite some public accusations to the contrary, Norton does not automatically turn on Norton Crypto when you subscribe to Norton 360 security software. Norton skims 15% vigorish as a service fee before any of the value is allocated to customers. When the tool is turned on, Norton brings together all of its customers’ mining capacity into a pool of computing power that mines Ethereum then breaks the value of the mined currency into pieces and deposits a small percentage into a Norton digital wallet held in the cloud for each participating customer. Norton Crypto allows paying customers to mine cryptocurrencies while their computers are otherwise inactive.

Norton LifeLock has started offering the “Norton Crypto” tool as part of its famous yellow-branded Norton 360 software for home and business computers. In the internet age, software firms from the 1990s may count as “old-economy.” Not that Norton LifeLock is an old-economy company, but it is a relatively stogy security firm offering a two-decade-old product that seems less relevant now than it used to be. No, the newest surprising news is Norton LifeLock as a crypto miner. The New York Times stated at the time, “Almost immediately, critics pounced on the company’s plans, characterizing them as a desperate money grab.” Kodak soon abandoned the coin and digital mining effort and Kodak now claims to be a drug company. We know that a few years ago photo giant Kodak, whose primary product was replaced by ubiquitous digital cameras on smartphones, announced moves into cryptocurrency called KodakCoin and Kodak KashMiner which quickly and temporarily boosted Kodak’s stock price 60%. For example, according to Krebs On Security, RadioShack relaunched in 2020 as an online brand and “now says it plans to chart a future as a cryptocurrency exchange” by helping old-school customers feel comfortable with crypto speculation. We often note a whiff of desperation in old-economy businesses trying to re-invent themselves as blockchain or crypto companies.

The trend has continued through the pandemic.

In the before-times – the heady days of 2017 when the prices of both Bitcoin and Ethereum skyrocketed and seemed immune to gravity – several well-known companies boosted their value by claiming to build new products on the blockchain or to create a solid trustworthy crypto-coin.