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Employee "Disciplined" For Installing Bitcoin Software On Federal Webservers
Fluffeh writes "Around a year ago, a person working for the ABC in Australia with the highest levels of access to systems got caught with his fingers on the CPU cycles. The staffer had installed Bitcoin mining software on the systems used by the Australian broadcaster. While the story made a bit of a splash at the time, it was finally announced today that the staffer hadn't been sacked, but was merely being disciplined by his manager and having his access to systems restricted. All the stories seem a little vague as to what he actually installed, however — on one side he installed the software on a public facing webserver, and the ABC itself admits, 'As this software was for a short time embedded within pages on the ABC website, visitors to these pages may have been exposed to the Bitcoin software,' and 'the Coalition (current Opposition Parties) was planning on quizzing the ABC further about the issue, including filing a request for the code that would have been downloaded to users' machines,' but on the other side there is no mention of the staffer trying to seed a Bitcoin mining botnet through the site, just that mining software had been installed."
Reminds me of the guy who got fired for running SETI@Home on all the PCs where he worked. Of course, he also (allegedly) stole 18 computers and accelerated the depreciation cycle, etc...
There are some antispamming systems that force the client/message sender to perform some useful computation before they, e.g., accept the message to be sent, with the server verifying that the computation actually took place. A spammer would have to perform an outrageous amount of computation to have his messages sent, while an ordinary user wouldn't even notice the background process running while he's typing away. Perhaps with this idea generalized to a broader set of client/server applications, the engineer could have said that he did it to improve the security and fair use policy of the servers (and keep the bitcoins :-)).
Ezekiel 23:20