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Principal Fired For Using School's Computer Room To Mine Cryptocurrency (bbc.com)
"A Chinese headmaster has been fired after a secret stack of crypto-currency mining machines was found connected to his school's electricity supply," writes the BBC. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
Teachers at the school in Hunan became suspicious of a whirring noise that continued day and night, local media report. This led to the discovery of the machines, which were mining the crypto-currency Ethereum. They racked up an electricity bill of 14,700 yuan [£1,600, or about $2,100]...
The headmaster had originally spent 10,000 yuan on a single machine for use at home, but allegedly decided to move it to the school after he saw how much electricity it consumed... A total of eight mining machines were installed in the Hunan school's computer room between summer 2017 and summer 2018... The deputy headmaster also became involved in the scheme and allegedly acquired a ninth machine for himself in January, which was also installed at the school. The computer network in the building became overloaded as a result of the mining activity, according to reports, and this "interfered" with teaching.
All the money earned through the mining operation has now been claimed by the local official responsible for "discipline inspection."
The headmaster had originally spent 10,000 yuan on a single machine for use at home, but allegedly decided to move it to the school after he saw how much electricity it consumed... A total of eight mining machines were installed in the Hunan school's computer room between summer 2017 and summer 2018... The deputy headmaster also became involved in the scheme and allegedly acquired a ninth machine for himself in January, which was also installed at the school. The computer network in the building became overloaded as a result of the mining activity, according to reports, and this "interfered" with teaching.
All the money earned through the mining operation has now been claimed by the local official responsible for "discipline inspection."
The entire cryptomining philosophy laid out bare here: Cause and convert someone else's electricity spending into personal profits.
If Enron was still around, they definitely would be lobbying in favor of cryptocurrency.
quit buying cheap chinese nework gear, maybe? owait....
Is there some continuing delusion that cryptocurrency serves any real purpose?
He have bought the German-engineered Be Quiet silent case fans to replace the cheap Chinese knockoffs.
must be an poor network power is more likely to overload with mining.
Sounds like an interesting job. How do I apply?
He wasn't really fired for mining crypto currency. He was fired for adding $2,100 to the school's electricity bill, plus probably causing significant wear on eight computers owned by the school. Absolutely should have been fired for that.
I also would completely agree that crypto currency mined on school computers, with the electricity paid for by the school, should be property of the school.
By fired, you mean, in front of a firing squad?
I doubt a single school principal has the knowledge to do this here.
Give the rampant corruption shot through the Chinese nation the principle wouldn't have had that problem if he would have handed over the usual bribe to the correct local member of the party.
Principle fired for principal...
Yep. Must be Slashdot.
Back in college in late 90's I installed the SETI search program on all computers in an empty dorm computer lab over the summer (I worked for the network team, we supported the lab, and I had the keys). It was only about 15 computers, but I kept them running for 3 months 24x7 with 100% CPUs. Nobody found out, the dorm was deserted. It got warm in that room though, i doubt any electricity use was noticed though. Even if they had noticed something and checked the lab they would only think we forgot to turn them off.
Unfortunately we still have not discovered E.T... We could be putting humanities excess compute resources to much better use though.
If u read further he made enough to retire well. :)
[($)]
There's one giant mistake. I'm fairly certain that Ethereum miners use like 1kbps tops to operate. I know DAG files are created but I don't think they're that bandwidth heavy. There is no way that they "interfered with teaching" from network congestion. That is simply impossible.
As someone with A LOT of Cisco certs who works for a huge Cisco Gold Partner... I recently started using Huawei because itâ(TM)s good enough and it is much cheaper and their support is far more responsive than TAC.
I mean Jesus, have you seen the price of Catalyst 9000? Then the insane cost of DNA on top? An update on a 9k takes up to 45 minutes of downtime and if thereâ(TM)s problems and you have to roll back, it could be another 45 minutes. If you are running a stack, you might need 5-8 hour outage windows.
Then thereâ(TM)s the issue that if a back door is found in Huawei, it will cause international incidents. If there is a back door in Cisco or the FBI gets caught intercepting Cisco products in shipping and adding back doors, it just gets swept under the rug as though it is no big deal.
Nope... I am working on a proper enterprise Zero-Trust design using Huawei to offer to my customers. Cisco has gotten too greedy.
Oh and Juniper is overpriced crap with no community outside the states. HPE/Aruba is a horrifying disaster... Alcatel is ok... if you want to have no hope of finding answers to problems.
So itâ(TM)s Cisco, Huawei or D-Link these days and Cisco is too expensive, D-Link is... well D-Link... it is better just to use Huawei and design the corporate infrastructure to use the network for networking and leave the security to software.