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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...
Depends on how you define malware. Some people would consider malware to be anything that runs on your computer without permission or knowledge. The "mal" part would be where it uses your system resources that could otherwise be allocated to programs you want to run.
This guy was going to fill the Federal budget deficit, but no, all the stupid bureaucracy gets in the way.
Before know-nothing morons start commenting on this article, here's some truth from an actual bitcoin miner. Mining software has no public facing interface when ran from a website. He also was not trying to send out a virus to mine for him or he'd be arrested and fired. He was simply using the CPU and GPU cycles to mine coins and make money.
This is exceptionally stupid because if it was CPU mining, well my i5 chip can hit 8 million hashes per second and my single overclocked 5830 Radeon card can hit 315 million, making it almost 40x faster. So assuming it was a faster modern Xeon, let's say 2x the speed, if the company owned 40 servers and he ran it nonstop on all of them at 100% CPU usage (not likely) then he should have instead bought 1 5830 for about $90 on ebay and mined coins himself. What an idiot.
It is possible that the servers had AMD/ATI cards that he was using without much performance impact on the website(s) but google "bitcoin hardware mining comparison" to see just how awful cards that aren't optimized for gaming do at mining.
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
Federal implies "of the Federation", which in the context of Australia implies the government. However while the ABC being the state broadcaster is funded (and owned) by the government it is not a federal organization. The ABC is independent of the government, so saying that the bit coin software was installed on federal servers is disingenuous to say the least. In fact after reading TFA's I can't see anywhere where it specifies exactly on what servers the software was installed other than some "web servers".
And once again the summary is a joke. You explain what "the coalition" is, but don't explain what the ABC is. I feel sorry for the people who pay for this site.
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Government issued cars with "For Official Use Only" would seem to be an exception to that. I've seen a Lexus around here with that stamped on it with a car seat and groceries piled in it. Sure, there could be an official reason for that but the odds are against it.
I can authoritatively comment on this, that a TDY car for all intents and purposes can be used almost exactly like a privately owned vehicle. TDY is the govt equivalent of a short to medium term business trip (maybe 1 day to I think a max 6 months). Basically its cheaper for the .gov to act like a car leasing company to itself, than to reimburse .gov employee for a rental car. Which is bizarre, you'd think Enterprise Rentacar would donate re-election funds to politicians to take over that apparently lucrative market, but they haven't done so ... yet. Someday it might happen to eliminate the non-scandal scandal stories.
The law says something like "administrative discretion" so its one of those "character" tests where you can do anything your boss allows but don't do anything stupid. This is really the only rule for a govt car. It can be hard for outsiders to wrap their head around this concept of not having 1000 individual specific rules, and only having a general rule of don't do something your boss thinks is dumb. A remarkable amount of .mil paperwork and regulations to death the stupidest little things and also has no paperwork and regulations for some of the most complicated things. Discretion and good taste...
Get permission from boss to drop kid off at daycare, fine no problemo as long as you have that permission. Drive to an occupy-wall-street protest in a non-official role, or as a protester, um... that might be a problem. Food store/restaurant while on TDY, almost certainly OK, that's the whole point of giving you a TDY car. Dive bar while on TDY, could get you in hot water depending on your boss and local culture and especially your behavior (this can be an addition charge in a conduct unbecoming hearing, or it can just be ignored if the department memorial day party is held at the dive bar). Do anything as a recruiter however tangentially far fetched as long as it directly involves potential recruits, OK. Do almost anything as a recruiter alone in a car without obvious recruit involvement, probably a bad idea.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Busy computers consume more electricity. And electricity costs real money. Now some this up over all the customer who unknowingly lost a couple of cents like this, and suddenly we are talking real money. One of the rare cases where the "theft" label is appropriate for a digital crime.
They made him live on bitcoins for a week.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So while someone may not get in trouble for using their FOUO car for groceries on the way home from work
That's almost the definition of why they give you a TDY car, not abuse of the system at all. Been there driven that. It was not a snazzy lexus but some POS falling apart compact chevy for me. The scandal is why its a lexus, not why its at the grocery store. Cheaper for the .gov to essentially be its own leasing company than for them to reimburse you for a rental or endless taxi. Also think about it... if you bring donuts to a official meeting at any time during your TDY, that grocery trip was now official business. Sgt merely told me not to do anything I wouldn't want my mom to see on the front page of the paper (now a days they probably say on facebook or whatever). This was nearly 20 years ago, things may be different now.
You end up in some pretty twisted logic if you give TDY people a car and pay them a TDY per-diem specifically for food that they can only spend on foot, or something weird like that.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This only happens in government vehicles.
Nobody ever used a company car for anything but business. In fact, no teenager has ever borrowed the family car to "go to the store for grandma" and then picked up his pals, smoked some weed and then drove out to the Labaugh Forest Preserve parking lot to spin some donuts on the frozen pavement on January 23rd 1983.
That totally never happened.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah that happens, and falls in the "do anything your boss allows but don't do anything stupid" superset of rules, although its also covered by the "don't do anything you wouldn't want your mom to see on the front page of the newspaper".
From personal experience, everyone seems to have heard some story about how a hot female recruiter got all the guys to sign up, but no one has anything more than "I heard" and a lot of wishful thinking / daydreaming.
I was thinking more along the lines of stories I've heard about recruiters driving kids with F-ed up families around so they can clear up their paperwork, like drive the kid to the DMV to get his ID card or to a Dr for an appointment to get an asthma waiver. I predict the level of this activity depends on how many applicants they get per slot and the state of the local economy, and especially the ratio of "recruits signed up this month" vs "monthly quota".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Many times I have court myself typing the wrong homonym. Like won part of my brain is dictating phonetically to the dumb typist lobe.
Nobody else does this? The odd thing is it is very obvious on proofreading, unlike a lot of other typo's that are easily mist.