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ABC (Australia) employee caught mining for Bitcoins on company servers
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- meatsock 15y agothe article doesn't mention if he did this for personal gain, but certainly goes out of it's way to call bitcoin a racket that's associated with drugdealing. an IT employee running a program on a server doesn't seem like misconduct to me!
- threepointone 15y agoReally? Using company resources for personal gain? Surely would sound like misconduct to any HR board in the world.
- meatsock 15y agoits of course a reasonable assumption to infer it was for personal gain, but it's not mentioned in the article, and the gossip column it sourced the info from is registration only.
- jacques_chester 15y agoIt's still personal use of ABC resources. It's a publicly funded broadcaster, I'm paying for it. I'm happy with this nong being sacked.
- ferdinan 15y agoWhat the article doesn't clarify is that the miner could have been running on the company's website as a JavaScript client, mining with website visitor's CPU cycles for personal gain.
- jacques_chester 15y agoUh, that would IMO make it worse.
- dools 15y agoke ke ke nong. I'm going to make a committment to use this word once a day for the next month.
- lhnz 15y agoEverybody uses company resources for personal gain. If we got no gain from working: we wouldn't work. The only difference is that this gain creates a zero-sum game in which the company is at a loss.
- gaius 15y agoWell, anyone who looks at Facebook or reads their email at work is technically misusing company resources. But when smokers take a 15 minute break every hour, I think a company who fired you for poking someone would find itself staring down the wrong end of a tribunal.
- JacobAldridge 15y agoI think that comes down to expectations. If an employer decides that Facebook is a distraction, communicates with staff that the site will be blocked, AND an employee hacks around the block in order to access the site - that could be a dismissal offence (more likely a warning, but if it's part of repeated behaviour...). Compare that to the (albeit, sadly, probably more likely) scenario that you are probably referring to - a boss deciding he wants to sack someone and using Facebook use, which the business has never actually defined one way or the other, as a reason - and yes, that's a silly business move.
- csomar 15y agoEverybody uses company resources for personal gain. Everybody uses company resources for the company gains. Only. In the end of the month, the company pays you something called 'salary'. You use the salary as you want. That's your gain. And your only gain. (Okay, may be bonuses, equity...) That's what I know (and learned) so far.
- lhnz 15y agoChange your tone: I'm sure we all understand the concept of 'salary'. :) I don't think that's our only gain from working at a company. Working at a company (1) gives you experience working on projects that you might not be able to get without the required trust in your personal brand, (2) socialises you with technical people from your discipline, and (3) increases your job security. I particularly consider (2) very important. Of course, you can quit your job and create as startup, but: you're creating risk for yourself and there are things which companies provide employees which have to be built over time.
- enko 15y agoNot a very smart thing to do. The employee must have known he was basically stealing resources, and yet the harvest from a few servers doing CPU mining would be miniscule, probably costing more in electricity than could be recovered by trading the proceeds. A $50 graphics card could have likely done a lot better, and no risk involved. Baffling behaviour.
- plantain 15y agoABC Australia produces content for the several TV stations they run, so it's not impossible he was using a GPU render farm which would have produced a very attractive return.
- etherael 15y agoDo GPU render farms use CUDA or open cl based cards? Do you have a link to the kind of setup you're imagining
- wladimir 15y agoBoth can be used. CUDA is not that different from OpenCL. Your underlying question seems to be "is it best to use ATI or NVidia cards for a render farm", I don't know the answer to that. Probably depends on the specific rendering software used.
- etherael 15y agoMy point is more does a render farm necessarily need to be one of those options? Actually I thought render farms were exclusively used by large 3d only productions rather than simple broadcasting networks that mostly deal in normal video? What kind of GPU based operations would such an organisation benefit from that they would need an in house permanent render farm?
- wladimir 15y agoHm I guess for high-resolution image/video manipulation, compositing videos, rendering intermediate 3d animations/effects, and such. But you're right they won't need more than a small render "farm". They don't need to render Pixar movies...
- JonoW 15y agoThis story got me thinking; what stops hackers from using huge botnets to mine bitcoins? Surely more profitable than sending out spam?
- 3pt14159 15y agoI don't know... You make about 0.1 cents per hour mining with a in the wild CPU, that's a lot of emails that could be sent out. Even if spam has a conversion rate of 1 in 10 million it is probably more worth it.
- batterseapower 15y agoThey aren't alternatives: spam is network IO bound, mining is CPU bound. The smart bot herder would do both. The main danger is that the target notices that their machine is using 100% CPU and removes the bot. It is easier to notice CPU load (heat, fan noise, prominent position in Task Manager) than network load.
- g123g 15y agoHad to happen one day. Is it a good idea for companies to try to use their abundant spare CPU capacity for mining? If there is an intelligent client that does not impact the existing operations of a server but can run on lower priority then what is the harm in making some extra money on the side to cover the cost of operations. The client can be intelligent enough to understand if it makes sense to actually do the mining based on its estimate of how much effort is needed to get some good returns. In case too much processing is required which it does not have or is bigger than a certain threshold it can wait for the conditions to become more favorable.
- devicenull 15y agoCPU mining really isn't enough to even break even on the costs involved. You really need a decent ATI GPU in order to get anywhere, which most servers don't have.
- eli 15y agoKeep in mind that an idle processor draws less power and therefore costs less to run. Unless your electricity is very cheap or free, I don't see how it would work.