

ABC (Australia) employee caught mining for Bitcoins on company servers - Auguste
http://thenextweb.com/au/2011/06/23/abc-employee-caught-mining-for-bitcoins-on-company-servers/

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enko
Not a very smart thing to do. The employee must have known he was basically
stealing resources, and yet the harvest from a few servers doing CPU mining
would be miniscule, probably costing more in electricity than could be
recovered by trading the proceeds. A $50 graphics card could have likely done
a lot better, and no risk involved. Baffling behaviour.

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plantain
ABC Australia produces content for the several TV stations they run, so it's
not impossible he was using a GPU render farm which would have produced a very
attractive return.

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etherael
Do GPU render farms use CUDA or open cl based cards? Do you have a link to the
kind of setup you're imagining

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wladimir
Both can be used. CUDA is not that different from OpenCL.

Your underlying question seems to be "is it best to use ATI or NVidia cards
for a render farm", I don't know the answer to that. Probably depends on the
specific rendering software used.

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etherael
My point is more does a render farm necessarily need to be one of those
options? Actually I thought render farms were exclusively used by large 3d
only productions rather than simple broadcasting networks that mostly deal in
normal video? What kind of GPU based operations would such an organisation
benefit from that they would need an in house permanent render farm?

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wladimir
Hm I guess for high-resolution image/video manipulation, compositing videos,
rendering intermediate 3d animations/effects, and such. But you're right they
won't need more than a small render "farm". They don't need to render Pixar
movies...

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etherael
I'd be interested to know for sure if the guy was actually running GPU or CPU
based miners, but I suspect he probably was just running a CPU miner on
everything he could get his hands on and hoping the return on the inefficient
approach could be overcome by volume. Likely now he'll lose his source of
income and get a lesson on risk v reward.

C'est la vie.

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sp332
If you don't have to pay for the power or the equipment, it's infinitely
efficient!

~~~
etherael
Losing your job is paying for it, just not the way you'd hoped. :)

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g123g
Had to happen one day. Is it a good idea for companies to try to use their
abundant spare CPU capacity for mining? If there is an intelligent client that
does not impact the existing operations of a server but can run on lower
priority then what is the harm in making some extra money on the side to cover
the cost of operations. The client can be intelligent enough to understand if
it makes sense to actually do the mining based on its estimate of how much
effort is needed to get some good returns. In case too much processing is
required which it does not have or is bigger than a certain threshold it can
wait for the conditions to become more favorable.

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eli
Keep in mind that an idle processor draws less power and therefore costs less
to run. Unless your electricity is very cheap or free, I don't see how it
would work.

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JonoW
This story got me thinking; what stops hackers from using huge botnets to mine
bitcoins? Surely more profitable than sending out spam?

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3pt14159
I don't know... You make about 0.1 _cents_ per hour mining with a in the wild
CPU, that's a lot of emails that could be sent out. Even if spam has a
conversion rate of 1 in 10 million it is probably more worth it.

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batterseapower
They aren't alternatives: spam is network IO bound, mining is CPU bound. The
smart bot herder would do both.

The main danger is that the target notices that their machine is using 100%
CPU and removes the bot. It is easier to notice CPU load (heat, fan noise,
prominent position in Task Manager) than network load.

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meatsock
the article doesn't mention if he did this for personal gain, but certainly
goes out of it's way to call bitcoin a racket that's associated with
drugdealing. an IT employee running a program on a server doesn't seem like
misconduct to me!

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threepointone
Really? Using company resources for personal gain? Surely would sound like
misconduct to any HR board in the world.

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lhnz
Everybody uses company resources for personal gain. If we got no gain from
working: we wouldn't work. The only difference is that this gain creates a
zero-sum game in which the company is at a loss.

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csomar
_Everybody uses company resources for personal gain._

Everybody uses company resources for the company gains. Only. In the end of
the month, the company pays you something called 'salary'. You use the salary
as you want. That's your gain. And your only gain. (Okay, may be bonuses,
equity...)

That's what I know (and learned) so far.

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lhnz
Change your tone: I'm sure we all understand the concept of 'salary'. :)

I don't think that's our only gain from working at a company. Working at a
company (1) gives you experience working on projects that you might not be
able to get without the required trust in your personal brand, (2) socialises
you with technical people from your discipline, and (3) increases your job
security.

I particularly consider (2) very important. Of course, you can quit your job
and create as startup, but: you're creating risk for yourself and there are
things which companies provide employees which have to be built over time.

