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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.
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?
What do you mean by worthwhile? For bitcoin, you won't manage to pay for the electricity using anything general purpose, so it won't be worthwhile at any scale. I don't know the particulars, but CPU mining of scrypt coins is at least not very profitable.
disclaimer This information is for educational purposes only, I want to keep my job.
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...
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Not nearly as efficiently as your regular heater does though. What do you mean? It's basically 100% efficient. Where else would the energy go? Through the ethernet port?
> It's 100% efficient. Probably above 99.99% but not 100%. The light from the power LED might escape through the window and there's some electromagnetic emissions in the parts of the spectrum that might also go through walls, same goes for the sound of the fan.
Congratulations, you're an asshole. Their response was entirely appropriate.
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.
Ah yes, bitcoin, the currency of the future that gives one big fat middle finger to the environment!
Nobody really mines using CPUs anymore, they use ASICs which are multiple levels of magnitude more efficient.
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-tim…
The main way to bypass it: bananas weren't deducted until the job completed. If you had a long-running task, or a program caught in an infinite loop, you could leave it running indefinitely and take the hit at the end of the term or just postpone the hit until it was more convenient for you to go ask for forgiveness.
EDIT: And a note, this was not established on every computer system on campus. Just one of the more commonly used non-major systems.
"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 bitc…
Correct. My computer pulls ~250 watts idling. It can easily go into 750 watts mining with a video card. I would imagine it can pull 320-375 watts at max cpu load.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not nearly as efficiently as your regular heater does though. So there is some cost.
>Not nearly as efficiently as your regular heater does though. What do you mean? It's basically 100% efficient. Where else would the energy go? Through the ethernet port?