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.
Re:Computer Trespass (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably so. Of course, the question this begs, at least in my mind, is not one of, "Why aren't these people in prison?", but rather, "Why does anyone go to prison over something so innocuous?"
Granted, you can definitely engage in forms of trespass that are much worse than this, but for something like this situation, which was promptly handled, had no major ill effects, and was responded to in a way that indicates it truly was a mistake, I don't see why anyone should be up for prison time, whether as an individual or a part of a company.
Re:Computer hacking... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it sounds like a pretty awesome business plan if you are not underhanded about it. Release your software for free with a note in he TOS that you will be mining bitcoins for the developer whenever you are using the software. Users get "free" software and developers get incentive to make software that people want to use. If you release rubbish not many people will continue to use it and you won't get paid.
Re:Sounds handled fairly well (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How much? (Score:4, Interesting)
The spooky thing about that is: There is a limited amount of Bitcoins that will ever exist and new ones are getting more and more expensive to mine. This means that if Bitcoin ever will take off every single one of them would get more and more expensive. Bitcoin will top out at 21 million bitcoins. If you have one million bitcoins you will own about 5 percent of everything that can be bought with it. As in: If Bitcoin would become THE world currency at some point you would own 5 percent of the world. Of course even owning one bitcoin would make you stinking rich then.
Re:Computer Trespass (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably so. Of course, the question this begs, at least in my mind, is not one of, "Why aren't these people in prison?", but rather, "Why does anyone go to prison over something so innocuous?"
Granted, you can definitely engage in forms of trespass that are much worse than this, but for something like this situation, which was promptly handled, had no major ill effects, and was responded to in a way that indicates it truly was a mistake, I don't see why anyone should be up for prison time, whether as an individual or a part of a company.
Leaving it running for at least 2 weeks is not exactly promptly in my book. Even putting it in the release code disabled, without notification, is shady as hell. The forums are apparently riddled with complaints about gpu problems, including dead graphics cards on machines running the bitcoin software. While it's entirely possible it's pure co-incidence, it's also entirely possible they damaged thousands of dollars worth of high end graphics cards - which given they can easily cost $500 a pop, wouldn't take many. Consumer grade GPUs aren't designed to run full throttle for weeks at a time. Especially if, for example, a gamer has a manual fan control so they can shut up the half dozen case fans when idling, and ramp them up when they start a gaming session (I use this exact setup). A couple of generations back, I fitted after market copper heatsinks and fans to my GPUs to improve cooling at lower fan speeds, but the downside was they had to be manually controlled via a rheostat, so if something like this had been running without my knowledge it could easily have literally cooked my gpus without me being any the wiser as I ramped them down when to cut noise I was just browsing slashdot et al. Those cards are still trucking in a friend's machine several years later, incidentially.
Criminal damage in the course of trespass for profit? Seriously bad judgement, and really not funny. Worth jail time? No. Worth some real consequences? Yes.
Re:Website with TOS? (Score:4, Interesting)
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279. By visiting this page you explicitly grant permission for our page scripts to run, regadless of the purpose, on your machine.
There. Any responsibility avoided. Furthermore, lately they are trying to push laws in the US that braking TOS is a federal offence, so blocking the "agreed-upon" scripts makes YOU a criminal!!