ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner • Hacker News Board

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#41

Post by username111 » Wed, May 01, 2013, 1:14 PM UTC

shitlord wrote: post #14

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…

The difference here is that ESEA was the most trusted league in America and the majority of competitive cs players have subscribed to it for 7 dollars a month. (The anti-cheat was only one aspect of the client)

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#42

Post by chriscampbell » Wed, May 01, 2013, 1:25 PM UTC

saurik wrote: 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…

Got the same Malware warning from Google Chrome

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#43

Post by joblessjunkie » Wed, May 01, 2013, 1:31 PM UTC

dreen wrote: post #33

lucb1e wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I don't know how popular their client is but I have a HD7970 which is not bad at all (enough to run any currently released game on full settings) and when I don't game I let it mine which gives me about $0.5 - $0.75 a day. I'm in it for the women tho not the money.

An HD7970 can peak at around 200W consumption, so the entire PC is probably consuming around 300W, or about 7kwh per day. I pay $.11 per kWH, so I would be losing money on the deal.

Good luck with the women!

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#44

Post by thaumasiotes » Wed, May 01, 2013, 2:35 PM UTC

seanp2k2 wrote: post #28

tantalor wrote: post #20

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.

The monthly power bill in my apartment is consistently $7 / month. If it went up by a factor of 5, I'd never notice; a while ago I got fed up and paid several months in advance because it seemed so ridiculous to have a $7 bill every month.

What's a typical power bill like, and what's going on with mine?

(my power uses - lights, fridge, and one to two old computers in a 400 sq. ft. apartment in downtown SF)

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#45

Post by lifeformed » Wed, May 01, 2013, 3:50 PM UTC

Let me provide some background on ESEA:

It's a paid service ($7/month) that lets you set up competitive matches of Counter-strike (and TF2 and LoL) with other ESEA players. It has it's own ranking system, it's own league/ladder, and anti-cheat system. It has over 20,000 subscribers. It's the most popular of such services for Counter-strike, and has been around for many years.

This incident is really serious. People have reported damaged hardware from this. Mining bitcoins can run quite hot if your system is not built for it. ESEA has been known for being scummy in the past - this is a huge breach of trust and security that I can't believe so many players are overlooking it.

The worst part is their response to all of this. They're playing it off like a joke and think it's no big deal. The $3600 they made came at the expense of far more than $3600 in electricity costs from the community. They lied about the whole thing, and keep changing their story as people figure out more of it. There's more discussion on this on the csgo subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dgad2/esea...

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#46

Post by bradleyland » Wed, May 01, 2013, 4:14 PM UTC

pale_rider wrote: post #16

The thread is closed, which links to an explanation, which is below: ----------------------------------- [lpkane] - 5.1.13 at 1:46am lol that got aggressive quickly back towards the end of march, as btc was skyrocketing, jaguar and i were talking about how cool it would be if we could use massive amounts of gpus logged into the client to mine we went back and forth about it, considered doing something for april fools…

> fast forward to 48 hours ago, a fuck up in the client server results in a restart which results in a setting getting changed which enables it for all idle users, and here we are

This is some of the most hand-wavy bullshit I've seen in my 15 years of IT experience.

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#47

Post by jacobquick » Wed, May 01, 2013, 5:23 PM UTC

Should change this link to an actual news item, currently it goes to their front page which of course provides no information. I know reddit's crappy but this post is actually doing a good job aggregating info as it becomes available: http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1dglil/popular_compet...

This should probably be a really big story covered and analyzed by all the serious video game journalists... just kidding those don't exist. If we're lucky maybe Forbes will cover it or something.

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#48

Post by supercoder » Thu, May 02, 2013, 12:49 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #44

seanp2k2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The monthly power bill in my apartment is consistently $7 / month. If it went up by a factor of 5, I'd never notice; a while ago I got fed up and paid several months in advance because it seemed so ridiculous to have a $7 bill every month. What's a typical power bill like, and what's going on with mine? (my power uses - lights, fridge, and one to two old computers in a 400 sq. ft. apartment in downtown SF)

Sometimes if the meter is not accessible by an electricity company they'll just use an 'estimated' reading from past bills. Could be your lucky enough to be stuck with some very low past estimated reading.

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#49

Post by EvanKelly » Thu, May 02, 2013, 12:52 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #44

seanp2k2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The monthly power bill in my apartment is consistently $7 / month. If it went up by a factor of 5, I'd never notice; a while ago I got fed up and paid several months in advance because it seemed so ridiculous to have a $7 bill every month. What's a typical power bill like, and what's going on with mine? (my power uses - lights, fridge, and one to two old computers in a 400 sq. ft. apartment in downtown SF)

I live in a 4 bedroom house in Hawaii. My power bill is usually around $200. We don't have A/C or anything other than your typical household appliances. Hot water heater gets a solar credit applied to it. Then again our price/kWh is $0.35 which is significantly higher than the rest of the country.

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#50

Post by dm2 » Thu, May 02, 2013, 6:48 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #44

seanp2k2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The monthly power bill in my apartment is consistently $7 / month. If it went up by a factor of 5, I'd never notice; a while ago I got fed up and paid several months in advance because it seemed so ridiculous to have a $7 bill every month. What's a typical power bill like, and what's going on with mine? (my power uses - lights, fridge, and one to two old computers in a 400 sq. ft. apartment in downtown SF)

Do you not have A/C or heat? Microwave? Dryer? Water heater?

My apartment is only about $110 per month but there is also a $50 gas bill. And I like to think that I live pretty minimally...