Rogue employee fired for turning game into Bitcoin mining colony | Hacker News Reader

Rogue employee fired for turning game into Bitcoin mining colony

wired.co.uk

111 pointspmorici58 comments

In 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.

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.

It'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.

$2400 every few weeks is enough to live comfortably in most of the First World, actually.

> It's recurring income that requires zero effort once it's running.

It doesn't seem to be very recurring.

I always thought stealing at work or looking at porn was ridiculous for the same reasons. Talk about poor risk analysis.

He must have put the decimal point in the wrong place or something.

LOL. Office Space or Superman 3?

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.

There's some intent here -- this is clearly intentionally abusive of users' computers, and for his personal profit. Seems pretty clearly malicious.

I consider most of the crap that goes on in commercial software to be intentionally abusive of users' computers....

This seems less malicious than, say, installing Ask toolbars.

> 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.).

No it can't and it shouldn't. The GPU will just downclock if it can't handle the heat.

I've never heard of a GPU automatically downclocking due to heat. Source?

Other scenarios:

When the fan (eventually) fails, the GPU will fall victim soon after.

A lot of gamers also overclock their GPU which would put that GPU at even more of a risk.

>Don't all video games do that?

The software actually provides access to competitive leagues and various other resources for various games.

I think this is a good summary of the backstory:

http://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1hn6n5/esea_north_ameri...

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

Running 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.

It 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....)

That depends on who pays for the bill. I can see employees abusing their companies' electricity, or students in schools, etc.

>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.

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.

CPU and GPU mining are pretty much useless at this point. ASIC mining is where it's at.

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.

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.

No, 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.

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).

I think it's more profitable to install Google Chrome or the Ask Toolbar, even "reputable companies" have fallen to the dark side :/

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.

to be nitpicky, Gox was sued by CoinLab for breach of contract (handing CoinLab the US market for a comission)

Oops, I didn't see what I had typed in. Thanks for correcting me. :)

Apparently 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?

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.

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 came to say exactly this. No code reviews, no source control. Pretty scary.

Scary at the least. I guess we dont know the whole story. Was it just 1 guy, a group of guys? Wow.

How did this code damage computers? Overheating? Kept fans running higher?

just thermodynamics really. the cpu cycles spent mining bitcoins are in fact costing the user something.

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)

Quite a bit higher, in fact. Under full load a fanboy graphics card dissipates 100 - 150 W. A wattmeter is instructive toy.

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

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.

While mining litecoins, a capacitor in my power supply blew up. I saw a huge jolt of blue, my monitor lost connection and finished up with some smoke.

GPUs overheating and getting damaged from said heat. Running a GPU at 100% for days is probably a good way to burn it up.

For 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.

am i the only one that read this as employee of rogue ales (http://rogue.com/)? i need a beer ...

  It's possible to earn virtual currency by lending computer processing power to the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network

Bitcoin is apparently a P2P network.

P2P network actually isn't a bad description.

Uhm, yes? I'm not sure what's your point. It's a currency based on a P2P network.

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]"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com