Ok, I got it! It is like a known feature or parameter and not really an unknown bug or error. 

\\\\\v\\\\\ CBS websites are mining XMR? lol!

http://cfd.net.au/article/two-cbs-websites-contained-code-mine-monero-thu-09282017-0229.html

   That filled my last bid set at the end of August.  Don't mind resuming proper price growth from here    Markets will be pushed where those with the resources choose to push them, however I didn't expect a drop much beyond here (0.022) because the high wasn't a huge jump up from the ATH, which we have been testing for months. A deeper retrace from 0.07+ would surprise me less...

Snowden coming out against Monero in favor of ZCash is, to me, just one more nudge towards his whole situation being a "controlled opposition psy-op" entirely from the get-go

It's a shame, really... philosophically/politically I'd prefer to believe that he's the real deal.

But unfortunately that's been looking more and more unlikely as time goes on, the more he opens his mouth...

Yeah I'm with you, I'd like to think he was just put on the spot and didn't have enough time to give an educated answer.

That can be easily answered with this

ZEC principals produced and widely disseminated a paper which demonstrated that a large proportion of chain transactions from earlier revisions of the software could be linked and traced.  Their analysis was disingenuous in that it did not pertain to the current software.

To call a revision incorporating mandatory RingCT 2 "amateur" is to highly esteem amateur work, and also extends "amateur" to include the work of many mathematical and cryptographic software professionals.

Anyhow, all respectable crypto is amateur.  Professional crypto - RSA, anyone? - is uniformly backdoored AFAICT, while reliable crypto such as GPG and XMR is community-driven open source software, subjected to extensive peer review.  Given the public statements of Green and Wilcox that ZEC can be backdoored responsive to a subpeona and the corporate single point of governance failure embodied in ZEC, as well as the historical facts that Alphabay was taken down 5 days after implementing ZEC and that the Alphabay ZEC was traced (while the XMR was not) I cannot imagine how anyone aware of facts on the ground could risk themselves to ZEC, not when the situation is serious.

Zcash backdoored? Any far fetched theories or hints to support that claim? Or just angry at their PR strategy?

I have always been kind of suspicious of Zcash. Even regardless of the technology I just don’t want to have anything to do with it because of the pump-and-dump nature of it.

Besides, it’s not even open source. If it’s not there’s know way of knowing for sure it’s even safe, especially given the immense speculation that it isn’t.