It'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.
I 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.
I witnessed a fraud where someone ended their career over a couple grand in expenses. I couldn't believe it. My takeaway was they thought they wouldn't be caught, or they could talk their way out of it if they were.
Unless this is a case of someone saying, "Wouldn't this be cool?" it's probably the tip of the iceberg. The bitcoins could be fueling a drug or gambling habit, or something else. The story is rarely as simple as one mistake - there's usually a history of poor judgment.
Wow. 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.
> 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.).
Being 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).
Hmm 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
Doubtful 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.
I 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.
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.
or 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).
Yes, there are still lots of pools - https://www.btcguild.com/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.
Before 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.
You 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.
I 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.
There 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.
I 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.
Don't even need to overclock them. Given a sample size of 14000 GPUs, I would expect a couple hundred to at least bluescreen simply from being placed under a sustained serious load for the first time.
Try running the FurMark stress test on any given machine. If you don't get glitches or a reboot, that GPU is above-average stability in my experience.
This is a sad comment on the state of consumer hardware. Speaking from my viewpoint as a computational chemist, a video card that fails memtestG80 is not merchantable and gets slung back at the manufacturer.
After a while you have learned how fast companies deal with RMAs and you know that factory-overcooked hardware is next-to-useless.
>This is a sad comment on the state of consumer hardware
And also incorrect. A system crashing on a combined Linpack/Furmark load is defective or contains a defective component. Even extremely thermally-limited laptops do not suffer from this due to protection mechanisms.
I 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.
Bitcoin 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)
I 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
From 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]"
Ouch. Hardly worth it.