Re: Excessively energy-consuming software considered malware?

[Taylan Kammer <taylan.kammer@gmail.com>]

On 20.02.2022 11:05, Maxime Devos wrote:
> 
> Guix has a policy against including malware[citation needed 2], and
> furthering global warming[3] (and energy prices[4], if [3] is not bad
> enough for you) seems rather bad behaviour to me.
> 
> Would these miners be considered malware in Guix?
> 
I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies at all, but I don't like the idea of
excluding software from Guix on the grounds that it's harmful in some
indirect way.

Malware is software that harms/exploits the user without their knowledge.
The inefficiency of cryptocurrencies was never a secret, though people
didn't think much about it; recently it's become widespread knowledge, so
I think considering crypto miners to be malware is somewhat unreasonable.

An example of actual malware would be a *hidden* crypto miner that sends
the mined coins to the author of the software.

If we're going to exclude software on grounds of it being used in harmful
ways, I can already see people arguing that one should exclude software
such as aircrack-ng for aiding in breaching into networks, or anonymity
software like Tor because it aids perverts in sharing you-know-what or
aids terrorists in planning attacks.  Slippery slopes and all.

One might argue that those pieces of software also have good uses, but
the same could be argued about a crypto miner: perhaps I want to install
one simply to study its operation to aide in some sort of research, maybe
even research about its inherent inefficiency.  Or maybe I want to devise
a small-scale blockchain-based network for a niche use-case where the
blockchain won't reach an unwieldy size or will be limited in lifetime.

All in all, I think the baseline is that if something is software, and it
respects the user's freedoms, it belongs in Guix.

What do you think?  I'm happy to have my mind changed.  I've never used a
crypto miner and continue to be disinterested in them so don't care about
this particular case all that much, but the principle behind the reasoning
bothers me somewhat.

-- 
Taylan