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Gaming Company Fined $1M for Secretly Using Players' Computers to Mine Bitcoin
- cowstwo 13y agoGaming company fined $1M for secretly installing malware? Color me surprised.
- girasquid 13y agoI'm curious: if a gaming company were to distribute a game that had an option where you paid for it and an option where the client partitioned 10% of your capacity for mining (only while playing the game) - how many players would go for the free-but-mining-bitcoins option? If the game client was less greedy about the resources and everything was communicated up front, could this be a way to monetize free to play games without charging the player any real money?
- esrauch 13y agoIt's my understanding that consumer desktops consume more power than the value of bitcoins that works be mined, so the only advantage to a consumer under that scheme would be not giving payment info to the company.
- lsc 13y ago>It's my understanding that consumer desktops consume more power than the value of bitcoins that works be mined, so the only advantage to a consumer under that scheme would be not giving payment info to the company. Not giving payment info /is/ a huge advantage, especially for small payments. I mean, even when everyone pays for their own power, I think for payments up to a few dollars a month, people would pay twice as much to not have to deal with giving payment info. (this is different from, but similar to the old payment process of having your computer dial a toll-number to get access, because you have a lot more control over and understanding of how much power your system is drawing. It also won't show up on your phone bill.) Then, think of the large number of gamers who don't have credit cards, and how many of those folks who don't have credit cards /also/ don't pay for their own electricity. This sounds like the perfect way for a company that doesn't care about ethics to get children to pay for things.
- sejje 13y ago...and not having to set up a mining operation yourself, manage coins/wallets/etc.
- namityadav 13y agoI was thinking the same thing. However, if this company had infected those thousands of machines, and was presumably mining continuously, and it still was able to make only few thousand dollars, then I guess you'll not be able to get any meaningful revenue by only mining while the game was active. But I think if you offer a game for free to users with the understanding that their computer will be used to mine bitcoins continuously (but never exceeding, say, 5% CPU), a lot of users will still take you up on the offer. The power of free! I'm not sure if even that revenue will be meaningful, though.
- forrestthewoods 13y agoCoinLab has done exactly that for free-to-play games. Run their client, which mines bit coins when idle, and you earn free in-game currency. I do not think it's been particularly popular so far. It also causes a ton of user confusion and finger pointed at "greedy devs trying to get users to mine coins for them".
- fleitz 13y agoFucking programmers, always expecting to get paid. Why can't they be more like artists and other morons? They should be happy to be buried up to their eyeballs in debt with useless degrees and a job at starbucks.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- xerophtye 13y agoMy thoughts exactly whenever i read "greedy devs" on Play Store for very very cheap apps. Heck I was just reading a review of notability on PC Mag and they said if you want THESE extra features,l use notability, else the free ones are good enough. (it costs $0.99) So now you're gonna think $1 isn't even justified?
- fleitz 13y agoExactly, 1 dollar is half a cup of the cheapest coffee you can buy in the developed world.
- mahyarm 13y agoI would do it for litecoins although, not bitcoins, since there are no specialized ASICs to make GPU mining worthless. I've calculated there are about 64'000 $300 GPUs (7970) mining on the litecoin network, which isn't a lot.
- philwelch 13y agoIs bitcoin mining even the most profitable way to convert other people's CPU or even GPU time into money?
- namityadav 13y agoWhat are the other options to convert CPU/GPU processing to money?
- philwelch 13y agoThat's the million dollar question. I could imagine someone is willing to pay by the cycle for distributed computing, like a commercialized version of folding@home or something. The question is who and how do you turn it into a marketplace.
- tehwebguy 13y agoWow, I am genuinely surprised at how fast that was. Maybe that's the difference between someone like Google getting into trouble and dragging the case out for 3 years and someone who can't afford to do that?
- camus2 13y agoyou are spot on ! with the right friends at Washington, most of your problems will go away.
- tehwebguy 13y agoThat's not really what I meant though. Google, Facebook and others have paid plenty of fines, but it seems like they drag the cases out for years first (probably at great expense).
- themichaellai 13y agoLooks like it was reduced: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/e-sports-site-settles-covert-bitcoin-mining-case-for-1-million/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/e-sports-site-set...
- asdb 13y agoI don't believe it is an outright reduction. It looks like the fine was $1 million PLUS $350,0000. The potential reduction comes from E-sports paying the $350,000 and complying with the terms of the agreement over the next ten years. If they pay and comply, then whatever unpaid balance on the $1 million fine will be forgiven.
- Pinckney 13y ago>The program was also designed to give E-Sports employees full administrative access to users’ computers; they could access files, capture screen shots, track mouse movements, and monitor computer activity even when users weren’t logged into the E-Sports servers. Is there any indication that the large fine stemmed from the bitcoin mining, rather than the spyware? This seems like journalists focusing on bitcoin, because that's the buzzword of late, but it's not the part that seems overtly malicious here.
- rgower 13y agoThis kind of invasiveness is standard for good anti-cheat protection. The fine stems entirely from stealth bitcoin mining.
- r00fus 13y agoStandard - Screen captures? I must've been out of the gaming scene for some time now.
- kbar13 13y agoYeah, it's a relatively standard anticheat method now apparently. Makes sense, it kind of works like Hostgator's auto-screenshot employee spyware works. If a screenshot is taken while a player is in-game and there is a radar or if the player can see people through walls, then that's pretty good indication of cheats.
- MichaelGG 13y agoScreen captures while not playing seems excessive. But a screencap while you're playing seems like a quick and easy (albeit manual) way to determine if someone has gotten a render hack past detection. Right?
- ulrikrasmussen 13y agoStill seems pretty invasive to me! Especially considering that platforms like Steam has integrated in-game social networking features like chat, meaning that the game company could potentially pry into your private conversations.
- frisco 13y agoThat's actually a very interesting use of Bitcoin: post-advertising monetization. Eyeballs are directly monetizable by mining, which of course continues even after all BTC has been "mined" via transaction fees. I've been working under the thesis that "programmable money" will be interesting even if I can't see the applications now for a while, and this is the first real use not possible with a traditional currency that clicks for me.
- Houshalter 13y agoIt's not really practical. The most your gpu time is worth is whatever it costs someone else to set up a gpu cluster and do the same thing a thousand times more. Those people will eventually drive the price down to barely above power costs. That happened to bitcoin.
- frisco 13y agoExternalizing the cost onto the visitor could allow you to drive the costs past the cost of power and be ok, making it uneconomical for the GPU farm who pays their own way. I don't know how ASICs fit into this, but I see a bunch of ways to still end up in the model I described.
- asdfaoeu 13y agoThe problem is even high end ATI GPUs will only generate $.50 a day and that will only get lower as the network becomes after. Anything else generates less than $.05 a day which isn't worth it at all. A network specifically for this could never be set up either as there is no incentive to pay for the GPU time except when it's directly performing something useful i.e. bitcoin mining.
- nwh 13y agoIt's been done, tried, and it wasn't practical back in 2011. Certainly not now that the network is easily a thousand times faster.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
- idupree 13y agoI imagine it's sketchy enough to be illegal, but what specific laws were they accused of violating? I read the consent judgment to find out: "3. Defendants' conduct constitutes deceptive and unconscionable commercial practices pursuant to the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, N.J.S.A. 56:8-1 et seq. ("CFA") and unauthorized access pursuant to the New Jersey Computer Related Offenses Act, N.J.S.A. 2A:38A-1 et seq. ("CROA"). The Attorney General and Director (collectively, "Plaintiffs") submit this Complaint seeking equitable relief, to prevent any more consumers from being victimized by Defendants' practices, as well as penalties, restitution, investigative costs, and attorneys' fees." - p.2 http://nj.gov/oag/newsreleases13/E-Sports_Complaint_Consent-Judgment.pdf http://nj.gov/oag/newsreleases13/E-Sports_Complaint_Consent-... p.9 (item 38) lists the alleged "unconscionable business practices and deceptions". Also: ESEA is a New York company (p.3 / item 6). The laws are New Jersey laws. "Venue is proper in Essex County [, New Jersey], pursuant to R. 4:3-2, because it is a county in which defendants have otherwise conducted business." (p.3 / item 5)
- downrightmike 13y agoIt really isn't nearly as bad as Sony creating rootkits.
- infra178 13y agoHaven't you heard? We're supposed to hate Microsoft again and buy PS4s. You must have missed some meetings of the internet trendy hate club.
- bsamuels 13y agoUnder this ruling, wouldn't the guys who create league of legends be liable for secretly using people's computers as p2p seeds to distribute copies of the game to other downloaders? Both that and what's described in the OP taxes the user's machine/bandwidth for monetary gain for the software developer.
- drawkbox 13y agoProbably not since it is known that is what they are doing, torrenting the game is usually faster as well and users choose it. I wonder though if they just told the user and also gave them a piece if any at least in game but also bitcoin them maybe people would do it. However the stress on a normal gpu/cpu probably isn't worth it for the output as it has gone way past that. GPUs might start failing also and causing refunds/complaints.
- kozikow 13y agoI have been suspecting redtube is doing it. If I accidentally enter their website (hehe) my CPU jumps through the roof to level rarely seen in other places, even playing Diablo 3. I didn't look into what they are doing, but this seems like the most possible outcome.
- nyar 13y agobitcoins are mined with gpu I mean, they could be mined with cpu but it would be nothing.