
Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin - fournm
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/harvard-supercomputing-cluster-hijacked-to-produce-alt-cryptocurrency/
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heydenberk
I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine.
Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions,
believe it or not.

EDIT: Reversible computing
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing))
is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while
minimizing energy consumption.

~~~
chc
How do you make something incapable of being energy-intensive but still
difficult? The more computers have to work at something, the more energy they
use. I'm not the world's leading expert, but I don't see a way around that.

~~~
Crito
There is being energy intensive, and then there is being CPU intensive.

You could imagine a hypothetical coin that somehow uses proof of data storage
and retrieval instead of proof of work. Producing and running tons of
harddrives would still require power, but it would be a less.. direct..
requirement.

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plorg
When xkcd's April Fools comic ran this year[1] I was doing some Real Work on a
few of the engineering research servers at my university. When I noticed the
jobs were going much slower than usual I popped open "top". Lo and behold,
there were 20 instances of a program named 'xkcd', hashing violently,
collectively using 90% of the CPU resources. I checked each of the other
machines, and they too had been invaded by 'xkcd' daemons. Knowing that it
would be over the next day, and that my job could wait, I figured I wouldn't
try making trouble for the (presumably) undergraduate comic enthusiasts, but
it sure was annoying. I found out later through reddit that there were at
least three independent groups of students running the 'xkcd' hashing script
on the servers. (A few had also spun up EC3 instances, so presumably they had
a bit more skin in the game).

If nerds will do this for nothing but internet points, it doesn't surprise me
that semi-public resources will be exploited when there's a monetary incentive
involved.

[1][http://xkcd.com/1193](http://xkcd.com/1193)

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mkeung
If cryptocurrencies become mainstream, this will be a bigger problem I think.
Even things like "free" electricity are attractive for mining purposes, ex:
universities, businesses, etc. If every student setup mining, it adds up (at
the university / business' expense).

If I am the one paying for an office at $500 a month that includes all
electricity usage, is it fair to plug in a ton of mining hardware and profit /
subsidize myself? What if I manage to use more than $500 worth of electricity?

Is shared space even setup for monitoring individual renter's usage behavior?
I don't think so.

edit: note, I do mine Doge but with my own stuff at home

~~~
MartinCron
There is a new extremely "green" office building in Seattle that does
meter/monitor individual electricity plugs. It's uncommon, but not entirely
unprecedented.

~~~
boredinballard
Is that the greenfire campus or whatever in Ballard?

~~~
MartinCron
I was thinking of the Bullet Center on cap hill actually. Not sure about
Greenfire.

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fnordfnordfnord
I'm currently "ignoring" a similar effort in my lab (~20 workstations). I
don't think they've broken a MHash/s yet out of an estimated potential ~2-3MH.

~~~
46Bit
We recently received an email about our Comp Sci labs (300+ GPU-equipped
workstations) being used for bitcoin mining at night.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I hope not to receive a similar one. I overheard them talking about using an
external stratum proxy, maybe they'll also use ssl/ssh.

------
optymizer
This was a young researcher who's access to the cluster was never revoked when
they left a few years ago.

Original e-mail Harvard sent last week:

\------

Dear all,

I really hate having to send notes like this to our community - especially one
as smart, gifted and talented as you all are, but anyway here goes...

Yesterday we were alerted to an unfortunate situation by one of our community
members using the cluster who spotted an anomaly with a set of compute nodes.

Long story short, a "dogecoin" (bitcoin derivative) mining operation had been
set up on the cluster consuming significant resources in order to participate
in a mining contest.

I do want to also quickly state that we do not inspect, examine or look at
algorithms and codes that are executing on the cluster, we respect your
science and assume we are all good citizens. However, in the course of
business, or as happened yesterday, if we are alerted to unexpected behavior
we always investigate the cause of any issue.

So, to put this simply:

Harvard resources can not be used for any personal or private gain or any non
research related activity.

Accordingly, any participation in "Klondike" style digital mining operations
or contests for profit requiring Harvard owned assets to examine digital
currency key strength and length are strictly prohibited for fairly obvious
reasons. In fact, any activities using our shared resources for any non
scientific purpose that results or does not actually result in personal gain
are also clearly and explicitly denied.

As a result, and as guidance and as warning to you all, I do need to say that
the individual involved in this particular operation no longer has access to
any and all research computing facilities on a fully permanent basis.

Don't let this happen to you.

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TeMPOraL
Well, there you go.

This kind of use was sorta obvious since the dawn of Bitcoin (and even before;
in my high school people were running SETI@HOME screen savers on all school
computers to build up ranking points for their team). I'm not sure why so many
people act surprised.

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notacoward
Would it really surprise anyone if it was revealed that stuff like this
already happened with Bitcoin? Seriously, give a bunch of hackers with access
to racks full of Other People's Machines, plus an obvious way to turn cycles
into money, and the only surprise would be if they _didn 't_ take advantage of
the opportunity. I for one expect this to be the norm for every cryptocurrency
from now until the end of time. The only question is _how much_ of it the rest
of the world is willing to tolerate.

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userbinator
While I think there are many interesting properties of cryptocurrency and the
potential applications, I also can't help but think that this mining is just
an extreme waste of computing power; compared to other uses like research,
application development, hosting a website, even gaming (entertainment),
mining (use for heating aside) looks like it's not much more than using
computing power for the sake of using computing power, which I find extremely
disturbing.

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logfromblammo
I have heard people say that scrypt is better than SHA256 as a basis for
cryptocurrency because it doesn't put all the network power in specialist ASIC
boxes, but then stuff like this happens.

Do you think Harvard would have paid for a custom-build scrypt-coin miner if
someone wrote a real academic proposal for it?

~~~
steveklabnik
There have been some claims that an scrypt ASIC is coming soon, but I think
it's mostly vapor so far.

~~~
mkeung
From my understanding, scrypt ASICs have been held back by the cost of memory
hardware as scrypt requires more memory usage. There has been talk of forking
existing scrypt currencies to require even more memory to counter ASICs
further but so far I think only a few new coins have done this.

~~~
jcampbell1
My understanding is the scrypt currencies use the lowest possible memory
factor, which was just stupid.

~~~
tromp
Its memory requirement of 128KB is a compromise between computation-hardness
for the prover and verification efficiency for the verifier. You don't want
verification of a proof-of-work to take a lot of resources, since every client
has to perform it.

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tod222
From the article, Odyssey's Top500 page:
[http://www.top500.org/system/175596](http://www.top500.org/system/175596)

It debuted in 61st place in 6/2008\. By 11/2010 it had fallen to 434 and has
since dropped entirely off the list.

At 6 years old it's fairly long in the tooth now.

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ngcrawford
As someone who's used the Odyssey cluster extensively, I can add that the most
nodes I've run consecutively is ~ 500. While there are ~ 4000+ nodes on the
cluster there's no way any single user could run that many simultaneously.

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waiquoo
ha, wasn't me

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mgoszcz2
So it was you?

~~~
waiquoo
see my comment history...

