👤milewska🕑11y🔼29🗨️58

(Replying to PARENT post)

"Although I wouldn’t go so far to say that it is “stealing” (especially if they are like CU Boulder and leave all of their computers running 24/7 anyways)"

Now I am not entirely sure about this, but I am pretty certain that this is not how power usage on modern computers works.... An idling machine (what they will typically be doing) will be burning far less power than a computer pegging all of its cores running bitcoin miners.

👤Crito🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Here in Germany, studying at most public universities is practically free and Phd students (in the natural sciences and engineering) are paid for their work, while research groups are generally underfunded.

It doesn't matter if you just add a little more to an already large electricity bill. You are stealing money from an organization that is set up to benefit the common good.

I'm so glad that I never had to "give the bitcoin talk" to somebody when I was still doing computer admin as part of my Phd contract.

👤sentenza🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Congrats, my rough calculations say you burned through at least $25 of energy to net $2. You are as bad as the people who shatter car windows to steal a stereo or those who rip copper wiring out of houses. It's a shame they don't withhold a degree from you. Reassess your life.
👤conjecTech🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

"I still have a few tricks up my sleeve that CU doesn’t want to deal with any time soon!"

Probably want to be careful about that. No matter how smart/clever you are, you'll probably get caught doing whatever it is you're talking about. The school has already caught you doing something they didn't want you doing, so if it happens again, they might have a place to start looking...

👤JonFish85🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

> Slightly jaded by the threat, but at least it was a threat and not a course of action… I still have a few tricks up my sleeve that CU doesn’t want to deal with any time soon!

Congratulations, you're an asshole. Their response was entirely appropriate.

👤ceejayoz🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

> But my thought was: worst case-scenario I will have to give “back” the money made from the mining.

At my Uni there are rules for how the computers should be used. Installing this kind of software on a multitude of computers would be a breach of those rules. It would probably get you kicked out of the computer systems for some time, meaning you have no way to hand in your deliverables, use lab equipment etc. You would probably end up having to redo the semester.

Edit: I saw his edit to the post now. Looks like his Uni would treat it as a criminal offense.

> Future violations will be reported to campus police and treated as criminal trespass.

👤maaaats🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Reading articles like this makes me think of a distributed computing system we had at my college. Dunno if anyone's heard of condor, but basically, you'd submit an executable and some metadata to the central machine, and it would optimize and execute the job in parallel on all of the machines -- and every machine on the entire campus was hooked up to this system. That's a ton of computers, plus the school had its own massive data center. No need to hack anything, just log in and run a command.

It was supposed to be mostly for academic stuff, and one undergrad class where we learned about parallel programming. I wonder, though, how impressive it would be to run a bitcoin miner on something like that. Obviously unethical, and even if it wasn't, I've graduated and don't have access anymore. Still interesting to think about.

👤mcdougle🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

"How I misused university resources, potentially inconvenienced my fellow students, and wasted a ton of electricity"
👤Fomite🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

> However, not quite sure about the “criminal trespass” threat. [...] I find that hard to believe as it is a public university.

It doesn't matter that they're public, if they've asked you to stop it's trespass. You don't even have to be on campus, if you accessed the network from home it could be trespass to chattels.

👤paulgb🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

I did a similar thing earlier last year mining litecoin on a few dozen computers in my school's lab. What I did differently was I had a script running finger every few seconds which killed the miner if someone else was logged on to be nice to other users/avoid detection. I ended up making about $5 over a few days before stopping it out of guilt. In retrospect it was a really stupid thing to do; too much risk for too little gain.
👤pajohnson🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

I had the same thought back in 2012. The lab had just upgraded to the most expensive i7s available at the time. After reviewing my lab agreement, I quickly realized they could sue me for my organs.

A saner choice would have been to set one miner off, look at the results after 24 hours, and finally multiply that by 100. In retrospect, looking back at the benefit/risk analysis, you gained very little and risked too much!

Sometimes, especially in computing, sanity is asphyxiated by adrenaline. Just remember, you walked a dangerous line and to be more careful in your actions. The new acts/laws treating simple computational offenses as criminal charges are very extreme.

👤ambiate🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

I had a similar situation happen at my alma mater; we had a set of interactive login farms available (one sit-down computer cluster designed for interactive desktop use, and one shell cluster designed for remote login). Periodically, users would run around using up all of the farm resources they could find to go mine cryptocurrencies, to the extent that they would starve people working on real class work. The all-time worst were the GPU miners, which caused substantial desktop latency, since they threaded poorly with whatever the compositing window manager du jour was.

Sigh. Glad this guy got nailed. This kind of thing can be pretty disruptive. I think most of us did stupid things in our time at college, but I'm surprised that this guy has the temerity to go try to brag about it on Hacker News with his real identity...

👤jwise0🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

I think this was a mistake. Like others have said it's a waste of their resources and you gain basically nothing in comparison. Even outside of electricity, having to bug the IT guy to look at the activity and taking up resources that other students could be using isn't worth the $2. I'd put an apology up and remove the veiled threat, it's just going to cause you problems.
👤brandynwhite🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

How to commit a crime for no fun or profit!
👤poolpool🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

mining BTC without an ASIC is just pointless, you should have tried litecoin (LTC), with 100 CPUs you would made a lot of profit, someone recently posted how he mined LTC in AWS and actually generated a profit (it's not possible anymore AFAIK).
👤pacofvf🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Why on earth would you risk expulsion from college?
👤ck2🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

I've done this at my university, but in a slightly less obnoxious way.

We have a grid computing environment set up (using Sun Grid Engine) that allows people to run bulk jobs across both dedicated clusters and in spare cycles on lab machines. The way it was set up, CPU jobs on lab machines were set to an extremely low priority, so they don't interrupt legitimate use, and the jobs in some queues were set up so they'd be suspended when real jobs needed to run.

I'd submit hundreds of jobs to the background queue, which would run for a couple of hours and then stop. I also had access to a fairly large number of Nvidia GPUs which were used largely to teach people Cuda and run big simulations every month or so. I was able to use a pretty good portion of my college's compute power without being particularly annoying to other users.

I stopped after a while (maybe 2 weeks), because it was rather inefficient (I mined about 0.04 coins, at the time worth about $8) and because it was a huge pain to maintain. I would probably do it again with a different currency, but it's really not worth it.

👤vault_🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Should have gone with primecoins... I would guess on a pool you could get about 10 a day with that much power (assuming they were i5/i7 machines) and then traded them in for bitcoin.

Although apparently the difficult of primecoin was raised a month or so ago. In any case going for another coin and trading is likely to be more profitable.

👤boyter🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Interesting, I have access to a university cluster (in the top 100 of the top500) and I had played with the idea of using it in a similar way. I didn't actually implement it because I need to maintain good terms with the IT dept for my research (and everything else really). Does anyone know how this would scale or at what point (in terms of number of cores/memory) it would be a worthwhile?
👤waiquoo🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

A shithead does this on all the PCs of the campus of my private IT engineering school at Paris, but with Litecoins. He has roughly 200PCs working for him with a custom linux image that he set up via DHCP. So he has just to power on every single computer and they automatically boot on his image to suck power from the school (and to make next to nothing).
👤Artemis2🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

Using university resources for personal gains doesn't border on stealing. It is stealing. All the universities I had attended made me sign agreements which said so.

I am really curious to know how Bitcoin mining may work in India where you can simply throw a cable on the pole and steal electricity.

👤tn13🕑11y🔼0🗨️0

(Replying to PARENT post)

This is idiotic but his article about college gave me a better understanding of his motivation.
👤abus🕑11y🔼0🗨️0