When xkcd's April Fools comic ran this year[1] I was doing some Real Work on a few of the engineering research servers at my university. When I noticed the jobs

When xkcd's April Fools comic ran this year[1] I was doing some Real Work on a few of the engineering research servers at my university. When I noticed the jobs were going much slower than usual I popped open "top". Lo and behold, there were 20 instances of a program named 'xkcd', hashing violently, collectively using 90% of the CPU resources. I checked each of the other machines, and they too had been invaded by 'xkcd' daemons. Knowing that it would be over the next day, and that my job could wait, I figured I wouldn't try making trouble for the (presumably) undergraduate comic enthusiasts, but it sure was annoying. I found out later through reddit that there were at least three independent groups of students running the 'xkcd' hashing script on the servers. (A few had also spun up EC3 instances, so presumably they had a bit more skin in the game). If nerds will do this for nothing but internet points, it doesn't surprise me that semi-public resources will be exploited when there's a monetary incentive involved. [1]http://xkcd.com/1193 http://xkcd.com/1193