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Brain the size of a planet, and somebody uses it to create virtual coins

The Crimson reports somebody's had a stern talking-to by the people in charge of a powerful Harvard research computer network after managers noticed it was being used to "mine" or create dogecoins, a Bitcoin-ish "cryptocurrency."

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Comments

We only used the lab computers to download porn and pirate movies, not make "money"

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I use Odyssey for some of my work, and would never have thought of this kind of thing. Some people are always thinking.

RE the title of the story: nice.

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or molecule folding.

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Back in my day, the only porn you could download on the lab computers was constructed from punctuation marks.

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This might be something universities can look to for funding.

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Really not, the cost of electricity to run the calculations on Odyssey is more than the value of the virtual currency.

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what with their own nuke on site.

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I think it's somewhere in the compost heap of trade magazines atop my desk: a brief analysis of the costs/benefits of hiring CPU cycles on hacker botnets to mine *coins.

A major feature of hiring on the black market, IIRC, was that one could get more cycles more cheaply than one could if one had to deal with granting agencies' procurement processes, and make all the costs like electricity and environmental management a complete externality. It was the externalities that really made this a winner, not merely the cost per cycle.

If I figure out where I found the article, I'll post a cite, but this isn't my highest priority right now.

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A couple months back, Microsoft, Interpol, and some other organizations partnered to take down the"ZeroAccess" botnet. The hijacked CPUs were mainly being used to mine coins and to surf the web on fake web sites, "viewing" and "clicking" ads on those sites. The click fraud was simple yet clever, using real users' cookies and recorded mouse movement patterns to avoid fraud detection. I wonder whether coin mining or add clicking had a better ROI?

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/dec13/12-05zeroaccessbotn...

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May the Schwartz be with you!

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Marvin: "I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."

Zem: "Er, five."

Marvin: "Wrong. You see?"

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to the square root of minus one. And what do they say? Marvin, go pick up that piece of paper.

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