When it comes to the Pirate Bay, it's usually movie studios, music producers and software creators that get annoyed with the site -- you know, copyright and all that. But in an interesting twist it is now users who find themselves irked by -- and disappointed in -- the most famous torrent site in the world.

So what's happened? Out of the blue, the Pirate Bay has added a Javascript-powered Bitcoin miner to the site. Nestling in the code of the site is an embedded cryptocurrency miner from Coinhive. Users who have noticed an increase in resource usage on their computers as a result of this are not happy.

The issue is a very new one, with users only noticing a CPU spike starting later on in the day yesterday. Needless to say, the reaction has not been good -- even from the Pirate Bay's own moderators. Over on Reddit, there are complaints about "100% CPU on all 8 threads while visiting TPB," and there are also threads on the PirateBay Forum.

As noted by TorrentFreak, a quick delve into the HTML of the PirateBay reveals what's going on.

An administrator and "supermod" on the PirateBay Forum, Sid is far from impressed:

ffs [That's addressed to Winston not you lot.] That really is serious, so hopefully we can get some action on it quickly. And perhaps get some attention for the uploading and commenting bugs while they're at it.

He offers the following advice for anyone concerned about the latest addition:

Until it is fixed (and I would expect it to be fixed sooner rather than later) noscript will block it from running, as will disabling javascript. Blocking/disabling javascript will compromise site functionality in several ways: - scrolling back though pages of comments won't work - posting comments won't be possible - viewing the file list won't work

The website for the Javascript miner even recommends against doing what the Pirate Bay is doing -- that is, sneaking the miner in under the radar without telling anyone:

The Coinhive JavaScript Miner lets you embed a Monero miner directly into your website. The miner itself does not come with a UI -- it's your responsibility to tell your users what's going on and to provide stats on mined hashes. While it's possible to run the miner without informing your users, we strongly advise against it. You know this. Long term goodwill of your users is much more important than any short term profits.

Any thoughts on this?