Gaming Company Fined $1M for Secretly Using Players' Computers to Mine Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Gaming Company Fined $1M for Secretly Using Players' Computers to Mine Bitcoin

forbes.com

81 pointscomice54 comments

>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.

This kind of invasiveness is standard for good anti-cheat protection. The fine stems entirely from stealth bitcoin mining.

Standard - Screen captures? I must've been out of the gaming scene for some time now.

Yeah, 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.

Screen 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?

Still 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.

Well the whole point is to be invasive. The idea is to lock down the PC into a console-like platform. Without turning on TPMs, secure boot, and remote attestation, the only way to make sure the user isn't running modified code somehow is to effectively rootkit their system and spy on everything.

The anti-cheat stuff runs as part of the OS, so the company can do pretty much anything they feel like. I'd assume they only bother with screenshots on suspected cheaters, while they're playing. Otherwise it's a waste of effort on their part. But if you don't trust them to handle screenshots possibly containing snippets of IM, then you shouldn't be running their binaries as root.

I hate these kind of arguments.

What OS are you running? If you trust your OS vendor enough to run their binaries as root then you shouldn't be too worried when they screenshot your machine every minute and post the images online so your family can see the kind of porn you watch...

I know that online poker clients have been doing this for over a decade.

when the program is running, yes.

That'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.

It'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.

Externalizing 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.

The 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.

It's been done, tried, and it wasn't practical back in 2011. Certainly not now that the network is easily a thousand times faster.

Seeing as electricity is not free, you're basically just reaching into their wallet in an extremely indirect and dishonest way.

If they don't tell about it, this is bad.

But I can imagine this to be a serious business model.

However, that electricity gets converted into heat, so your heating bill gets reduced.

> However, that electricity gets converted into heat, so your heating bill gets reduced.

Do you really think heating a room with electricity is efficient? why do you think people use coal or gaz for that purpose ?

Edit : you are being sarcastic i hope.

Where did I imply that it was efficient? I was merely saying only looking at your electricity bill doesn't provide an accurate picture of the cost of mining.

Heating a room with electricity technically is very efficient, it's just not very cost efficient.

I have no heating bill, ever. Waste heat just makes my apartment more uncomfortable.

/cooling bill goes up

I'll remember that when it's 100 degrees outside.

I 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-...

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)

I'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?

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.

>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.

...and not having to set up a mining operation yourself, manage coins/wallets/etc.

I 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.

CoinLab 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".

Fucking 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.

My 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?

Exactly, 1 dollar is half a cup of the cheapest coffee you can buy in the developed world.

yes, and factor that against the amount of coffee cups it took to make that app... Devs are so undervalued these days. Especially App devs. We so need a labour union of our own!

Every time this comes up in a serious conversation, the only thing I can imagine is someone standing behind a manager saying "no, no, you're trying to create a macro in your spreadsheet - that's a programmer's job!".

Hahahaha not for the bosses, but a union that makes sure devs get properly paid for their hard work.

More like "No, no, no, you're trying to create an inventory management and accounting system in Excel".

I 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.

Is bitcoin mining even the most profitable way to convert other people's CPU or even GPU time into money?

What are the other options to convert CPU/GPU processing to money?

That'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.

Wow, 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?

you are spot on ! with the right friends at Washington, most of your problems will go away.

That'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).

Under 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.

Probably 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.

It really isn't nearly as bad as Sony creating rootkits.

Haven'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.

I 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.

bitcoins are mined with gpu

I mean, they could be mined with cpu but it would be nothing.

Looks like it was reduced: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/e-sports-site-set...

I 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.

Gaming company fined $1M for secretly installing malware? Color me surprised.

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