8 ms·
Rogue employee fired for turning game into Bitcoin mining colony
- thoughtpalette 13y agoBeing a part of the ESEA community since 2007, the majority of the CS players concerns are only that the person who implemented the code AkA Jaguar, was also the person responsible for bans on the network. Their have not been any bans for Cheating since the end of May (I believe).
- hkmurakami 13y agoHmm I wonder if users of "free apps" that currently show us advertisements would accept bitcoin-mining by the app instead of ad-display as a revenue stream. I guess the issue would be that mining bitcoins takes a bunch of CPU resources and would thus actually cost "money" for the user in the form of an electricity bill
- zeidrich 13y agoRunning a free app takes CPU resources and costs money in the form of electricity bills too. It's something that I'm sure users would be willing to do if it were advertised and well implemented.
- gohrt 13y agoIt would be cheaper for users to... actually pay for the product... then to burn electricity for bitcoins. (I will never be rich, because I implicitly assume the consumer market is populated with people of basic numeracy and logic skills....)
- icebraining 13y agoThat depends on who pays for the bill. I can see employees abusing their companies' electricity, or students in schools, etc.
- phyalow 13y ago>I implicitly assume the consumer market is populated with people of basic numeracy and logic skills. Hehe. Nice to see at least some people have faith in humanity.
- citricsquid 13y agoDoubtful this would work long term, as the difficulty rises it will become worth much less than advertising. People are already preparing to lose money on their investments in dedicated mining hardware, consumer hardware is not going to be able to generate more than a few pennies even with significant usage in a few months.
- pdog 13y agoCPU and GPU mining are pretty much useless at this point. ASIC mining is where it's at.
- jlgreco 13y agoI thought that was true for individual mining, but aren't large pools still filled with lots of CPUs tied together with BOINC or similar? I thought I read something along those lines a few months ago (a long time ago, I know), but I'm only vaguely recalling that.
- rallison 13y agoYes, there are still lots of pools - https://www.btcguild.com/ https://www.btcguild.com/ https://mining.bitcoin.cz/ https://mining.bitcoin.cz/ etc. While CPU mining is basically useless, GPU mining is still popular and still profitable for many (given current bitcoin prices). That said, as more ASICs start coming online, GPU mining will become less and less profitable.
- TylerE 13y agoNo, not really. To give you an idea, a fast i7 mining on all cores is about 15 Mhash/sec. A single ASIC miner can be 100,000-500,000Mhash. You would literally need 20,000+ CPU miners to equal a single asic miner.
- celticninja 13y agoor 22 x i7 cpus just to match a USB ASIC doing 335Mhash/sec - they currently retail at 1BTC so anywhere between £45 and £57 - whereas 22 x i7 will be approx £5500 (at £250 a piece).
- Aldo_MX 13y agoI think it's more profitable to install Google Chrome or the Ask Toolbar, even "reputable companies" have fallen to the dark side :/
- brianbreslin 13y agoHow did this code damage computers? Overheating? Kept fans running higher?
- banachtarski 13y agojust thermodynamics really. the cpu cycles spent mining bitcoins are in fact costing the user something.
- Hilyin 13y agoI don't think it'd damage the computers, if it did, it'd be very minor, like you said. I'd say the biggest effect would be people's electrical bills being higher.
- speeder 13y agoBitcoin mining on Laptop GPU is known to destroy whole machines (usually by overheating several parts of the motherboard and ruining them... also ruining the GPU itself too)
- HarryHirsch 13y agoQuite a bit higher, in fact. Under full load a fanboy graphics card dissipates 100 - 150 W. A wattmeter is instructive toy.
- shawabawa3 13y agoI did some GPU mining for about 5 minutes once. Had to stop it immediately because the noise my GPU was making definitely wasn't good for it. The fan still rattles a bit sometimes from the 5 minutes it was being run at 100% GPUs are not really designed for 100% load for prolonged periods of time
- testbro 13y agoI believe the concern was that it ran on GPUs (mining on CPUs hasn't been cost-effective for quite some time). Since GPUs are rarely run constantly and don't see loads like mining produces during typical use, their owners might have overclocked them under those assumptions. With those assumptions violated, I wouldn't be surprised to see cards fail prematurely.
- mmanfrin 13y agoIt's possible to earn virtual currency by lending computer processing power to the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network Bitcoin is apparently a P2P network.
- pdog 13y agoP2P network actually isn't a bad description.
- icebraining 13y agoUhm, yes? I'm not sure what's your point. It's a currency based on a P2P network.
- jlgreco 13y agoFrom wikipedia: "The concept was introduced in a 2008 paper by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto, who called it a peer-to-peer, electronic cash system.[1][8][9]"
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- morsch 13y agoIn just a few weeks ESEA's employee earned himself BTC30, or about $2,400 (£1,600) at today's exchange rates. Ouch. Hardly worth it.
- ceejayoz 13y agoIt's always baffling to me that people will take these sorts of risks for such small rewards. A few thousand dollars in exchange for firing, lawsuits, possible criminal charges, and a ruined reputation in your field? No thanks.
- morsch 13y agoI think it's often the case (not necessarily in this one, I have no idea) that people don't realize or convince themselves they're not doing anything that's wrong or a big deal. Still damning enough, mind you, but less malicious maybe and it explains the ignorance of the risks involved.
- rorrr2 13y agoIt's recurring income that requires zero effort once it's running. $2400 every few weeks is enough to live comfortably in many places in the world.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago$2400 every few weeks is enough to live comfortably in most of the First World, actually.
- ceejayoz 13y ago> It's recurring income that requires zero effort once it's running. It doesn't seem to be very recurring.
- Wingman4l7 13y agoI always thought stealing at work or looking at porn was ridiculous for the same reasons. Talk about poor risk analysis.
- jason_slack 13y agoApparently they dont do any code reviews, QA, etc? I always find it interesting when things like this "slip" through... If they used SVN of GIT wouldn't other developers have noticed files changing and reviewed the changes others are making?
- jleehey 13y agoI thought the same thing. How much code would it take to set up this mining operation? It seems unlikely that the amount of code added is trivial enough to go undetected.
- qwertzlcoatl 13y agoThere is a conspiracy theory going around regarding this issue being orchestrated collectively by the ESEA admins. This theory comes from several really weird statements from ESEA admin ipkane, made months before the Bitcoin mining was implemented.
- jenrzzz 13y agoYou might be assuming too much of them. ESEA's client is barely hacked together and, like most other anti-cheat software, uses some nasty methods to detect cheating. I wouldn't be surprised if their other development processes reflect on that.
- magal 13y agoI came to say exactly this. No code reviews, no source control. Pretty scary.
- jason_slack 13y agoScary at the least. I guess we dont know the whole story. Was it just 1 guy, a group of guys? Wow.
- Ellipsis753 13y agoWow. I wouldn't ever have even imagined that including a bitcoin miner in a program would be illegal. Sure they never declared that they did so but loads of programs do stuff that you'd never know about (for example reporting back personal data about your computer or running complex anti-piracy related code or modifying your system). I'm a little surprised you can sue for "damaging client's systems and spiking their electricity bills". Don't all video games do that? Hell, even javascript on websites has been known to go into infinite loops and max out my computer for a long time before I noticed. I'd never have thought I'd have a chance if I sued the person who wrote the bad javascript. Adding something secretly to your employers program without telling anyone however is defiantly something you can be sued over. Wow, sucks to be him or the employer really. I'm a little surprised he even tried, it's not really something that would be easy to keep secret for any length of time.
- awda 13y agoThere's some intent here -- this is clearly intentionally abusive of users' computers, and for his personal profit. Seems pretty clearly malicious.
- invisible 13y ago> I'm a little surprised you can sue for "damaging client's systems and spiking their electricity bills". Running a GPU at 100% for days will destroy said GPU pretty quickly. Heat can only escape from things so fast without being given a cool down period. GPUs regularly run $400+ and there was malicious intent with regard to the damage (unlike most bugs on websites/etc.).
- snappy173 13y agoam i the only one that read this as employee of rogue ales (http://rogue.com/ http://rogue.com/)? i need a beer ...
- turboroot 13y agoBefore CoinLab shifted gears and got sued by MtGox, what this guy got fired for was exactly CoinLab's startup: monetizing games through Bitcoin mining. Needless to say, with Bitcoin ASICs on their way back then, this wasn't exactly a sustainable business model.
- bjf 13y agoFor clarification, it wasn't a game that did the mining, but the ESEA client. What makes it worse is ESEA is already a paid service.