E-Sports League Stuffed Bitcoin Mining Code Inside Client Software 223
hypnosec writes "The E-Sports Entertainment Association (ESEA) gaming league has admitted to embedding Bitcoin mining code inside the league's client software. It began as an April Fools' Day joke idea, but the code ended up mining as many as 29 Bitcoins, worth over $3,700, for ESEA in a span of two weeks. According to Eric Thunberg, one of the league's administrators, the mining code was included as early as April. Tests were run for a few days, after which they 'decided it wasn't worth the potential drama, and pulled the plug, or so we thought.' The code was discovered by users after they noticed that their GPUs were working away with unusually high loads over the past two weeks. After users started posting on the ESEA forums about discovery of the Bitcoin mining code, Thunberg acknowledged the existence of a problem – a mistake caused a server restart to enable it for all idle users."
ESEA posted an apology and offered a free month of their Premium service to all players affected by the mining. They've also provided data dumps of the Bitcoin addresses involved and donated double the USD monetary value of the mined coins to the American Cancer Society.
the clear takeaway (Score:2, Funny)
It's OK to add secret bit-mining code to client software as long as you do it on April 1.
Donated double the amount to ACS (Score:1, Funny)
So, that's either a few fractions of a cent up to a million dollars....depending on the exchange rate at the particular time the money was donated.
Re:How much? (Score:2, Funny)
If nobody's buying them or accepting them as currency, what is their value derived from?
I'll stick with my Canadian Tire dollars, thank you very much.
Re:Computer Trespass (Score:5, Funny)
See, BPs big mistake was to put out the fire. As everyone knows:
Birds soaked in oil: evil
Birds fried in boiling oil : tasty!
Re:Sounds handled fairly well (Score:5, Funny)
What the GP said still stands. If he, as a person and not a corporation had done exactly that, admitting it, and donating the results would fall very short from freeing his ass from prosecution. He would more likely than not end in jail.
Shhh... don't spoil it. I'm enjoying the slashdotters trying to rage against overbearing police authority and misunderstanding technology ... while at the same time having to balance out corporate versus private individual rights, and for the bonus round it's something that ties directly in with their online privacy. I got some popcorn, wanna share? This is gonna be good...
Re:Sounds handled fairly well (Score:5, Funny)
Consider this: Which part of this "April Fool's joke" was supposed to actually be FUNNY?
I ask myself that every time I visit /. on April 1st.