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ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

play.esea.net

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#21

This isn't surprising in the least. Anti-cheat clients are the worst, ever scummier than anti-virus clients. If anyone here has ever played a game that used Inca GameGuard, you know what I'm talking about. If you open a page in your web browser with a title that seems suspicious to GameGuard, it can fucking REBOOT your computer without warning! And that's not the only client with such problems. From my experience, it…

...did you just imply that anti virus programs are shady?

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#22
post #11

From what I understand the guy who runs ESEA is pretty much saying "Yeah, we were talking about this one day and did it. Now you've caught us, so we'll be removing it and giving everyone a free month. We also made $3000 something dollars by mining with your computers, but we don't want you to be mad at us, so we won't do it again. But we totally had no problem with this earlier."

He also said that it was an accident and not meant to be pushed to all the users.

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#23

This isn't surprising in the least. Anti-cheat clients are the worst, ever scummier than anti-virus clients. If anyone here has ever played a game that used Inca GameGuard, you know what I'm talking about. If you open a page in your web browser with a title that seems suspicious to GameGuard, it can fucking REBOOT your computer without warning! And that's not the only client with such problems. From my experience, it…

Wonder if this ever caught on: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3105&cid=14426...

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#24

I'll bite. Why not sell a service to a mining pool? Many services are free anyway. I'd fork over an hour of GPU per day to see fewer the ads.

An hour of GPU is not much. I think a single GPU can do a few Megahashes per second. To hit one BTC/day you would need about 20 Gigahashes per second all day.

I think they'd make a bunch more by showing you the ads.

http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#25

This isn't surprising in the least. Anti-cheat clients are the worst, ever scummier than anti-virus clients. If anyone here has ever played a game that used Inca GameGuard, you know what I'm talking about. If you open a page in your web browser with a title that seems suspicious to GameGuard, it can fucking REBOOT your computer without warning! And that's not the only client with such problems. From my experience, it…

...did you just imply that anti virus programs are shady?

anti-cheat, like cheating-death or punkbuster

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#26

I'll bite. Why not sell a service to a mining pool? Many services are free anyway. I'd fork over an hour of GPU per day to see fewer the ads.

An hour of GPU is not much. I think a single GPU can do a few Megahashes per second. To hit one BTC/day you would need about 20 Gigahashes per second all day. I think they'd make a bunch more by showing you the ads. http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

But 1btc/day is >$100/day. They don't make that much on a single client showing ads. More like $0.10 at most, or 0.001btc (which takes much less mining power).

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#28

I'll bite. Why not sell a service to a mining pool? Many services are free anyway. I'd fork over an hour of GPU per day to see fewer the ads.

BTC mining on GPUs uses a ton of power, like quadruple-the-monthly-power-bill-in-your-apartment kind of power. If you're willing to pay the energy company and bring more harm to the environment for something, I don't feel like you're really thinking about the true cost. I'd rather just pay up-front on simple terms.

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#29
It was only a matter of time before someone tried this, if I were in their position I would contemplate it too given the rise of the cost of a Bitcoin and they won't be the last to try something like this. I the day a widely used software application like uTorrent decides to remove the malware and banner ads and instead bundles in a Bitcoin miner that runs when your machine is mostly idle (like download a torrent over night).

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#30
post #5

One of the times that I accessed this page I was given this error, for people who aren't using a browser capable of detecting this kind of thing (although I don't know how serious these detections really are). Danger: Malware Ahead! Chromium has blocked access to this page on play.esea.net. Content from bjskosherbaskets.com, a known malware distributor, has been inserted into this web page. Visiting this page now is…

I got the same issue. So I decided not to read the article...
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