ESEA busted for bitcoining

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Aug 10, 2009
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Yep, cancelled my subscription and uninstalled client. Will not tolerate this shit. I urge anyone with an ESEA sub cancel immediately, this is intolerable and a prime example of how companies can and will install their BS to take advantage of their customer base.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/05/01/e...public-client-causing-users-to-farm-bitcoins/

Update: ESEA co-founder Craig “Torbull” Levine has responded with a more official statement, posted to the ESEA news page. He admits they were testing Bitcoin integration, to “determine whether it was a feature that we might want to add in the future.” Ultimately, Torbull says, they decided against it.

He goes to claim that “an employee who was involved in the test has been using the test code for his own personal gain since April 13, 2013.”

“The owners and management at ESEA all apologize to each of you that were impacted by the recent events and intend to make things right,” Torbull continues. “ESEA has issued a free month of ESEA Premium to all of our community members who were enrolled in Premium for the month of April. We also ask anyone who has experienced any physical damage to their computers to open an ESEA support ticket.

“In an effort to maintain complete transparency, we have released all of the Bitcoin wallet addresses as well as data dumps of the wallets themselves. The value of the mined Bitcoins was $3,713.55 and ESEA will be donating 100% of the $3,713.55 to the American Cancer Society. ESEA will also match 100% of this amount for a total of $7,427.10 donated. ESEA is also increasing the Season 14 League prize pot by $3,713.55.”
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here's a following on reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1dglil/popular_competitive_gaming_league_esea_admins/

angry user wants to file charges

http://www.cadred.org/News/Article/196533/


ADDED:
User by the name of "WarOwl" went ahead and posted an outline of the situation which includes snippets from a conversation with "Jaguar" from ESEA, who is responsible for mining code in the client and redditor "GGTY" who pretty much exposed what was going on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmobeX3GvPU
 
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I didn't know WTF it was, either.

Sounds like they tried to make it up but I'm not sure you can fix that kind of dishonesty and exploitation.
 
^

It's about as bad as installing DDOS tools onto your machine along with another program. Very shady, and hope they get sued up the ass.
 
I guess the user has the right to be angry, a free month of membership isn't worth it when your 4890 and 560ti died. If my 670 died, I'd be pissed lol
 
Wow, that's fucked up. I feel dirty just reading about this. If it happened to me I would be LIVID.
 
Outright theft. Little different than a neighbor running extension cords to an outlet on your property.
 
I don't understand how this would even be considered for a legit feature of the client, how were they planning to pitch this? "Don't let your gpu sit idle! Why have working parts for the competition, when you could be making money the easy way!" I want to meet the genius who thought it would be a great idea to embed a mining app into procomp rigs.

the whole thing stinks of some greedy bitches trying to cover a huge fuckup, the stupid way. if anything they should've just claimed their distro was compromised. "lol my bad, april fools." really?
 
ESEA client was popping up on anti-virus scanners as well and when people put in support tickets, they were closed. Its horseshit really. $6 to cover a months membership is a joke. I cant wait to see the lawsuit they have coming. A lawyer is probably staying up all night to prepare a statement for this one.
 
My gf has been using ESEA for years. She us to be in an all girl clan back in the day. If she uninstalls the client will the malware be removed?
 
Tyguy, they removed the malware (mining) portion in a patch recently. She should be fine.
 
tyguy said:
My gf has been using ESEA for years. She us to be in an all girl clan back in the day. If she uninstalls the client will the malware be removed?
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No, because it's already gone.

Also lpkane is a fucking idiot and deserves to be gone.
 
DeathPrincess said:
Didn't people notice their cards running more than usual? :confused:
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I was wondering about it too.

On my old GTX 295, I would have noticed the cooler's obnoxious sound if the GPU continue to run after my gaming session.

While there are silent coolers out there, surely someone with a noisy system would have noticed their GPU still running at max load.
 
From the ESEA forums some users have pics from their machines of the miner files being installed as far back as 12/3/2012. These guys are in a freaking shit ton of trouble.
 
Hornet said:
I was wondering about it too.

On my old GTX 295, I would have noticed the cooler's obnoxious sound if the GPU continue to run after my gaming session.

While there are silent coolers out there, surely someone with a noisy system would have noticed their GPU still running at max load.
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My understanding is you can set the miner to use a specific amount of resources, go full throttle, or only at idle, etc....kind of like folding@home. I wonder if some update caused it to go full throttle?
 
Stiletto said:
Outright theft. Little different than a neighbor running extension cords to an outlet on your property.
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This exactly. They should be subject to civil damages if it can be proved that video cards were toasted.

Its amazing how their PR and management thinks that just donating to charity will make this go away. Some heads need to roll for this. Who approved the code and who was involved. Somebody had to have known about code.
 
sheesh how do you not know what ESEA is? Anyway that's a shame. I agree the amends isn't good enough but just shows what I'd always gotten the impression of, that ESEA is run by a bunch of kids. Some of the shit they've done in the past never sat well with me, they just don't seem like professionals. It always felt like they ran ESEA like the kids from HACKERS would run Microsoft.
 
I had no idea what ESEA or bitcoin were. still confused on WTF bitcoin is or how it has any worth.
 
MavericK96 said:
I 1) don't play Counter-Strike/TF2/Starcraft 2 and 2) don't give a shit about e-sports?
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Peh its common knowledge. Next you're gonna tell me you don't know which continent is the one with living Monotremes. Ridiculous!
 
piscian18 said:
sheesh how do you not know what ESEA is? Anyway that's a shame. I agree the amends isn't good enough but just shows what I'd always gotten the impression of, that ESEA is run by a bunch of kids. Some of the shit they've done in the past never sat well with me, they just don't seem like professionals. It always felt like they ran ESEA like the kids from HACKERS would run Microsoft.
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lpkane treats people like shit, but I have a feeling that Torbull, who is seemingly a pretty good guy, is covering lpkane's ass anyway. They're both owners but practically polar opposites in personality from what I've seen.

Lpkane is a clownshoe, completely undeserving of power. They need to purge the idiots that concocted this.
 
mas said:
I don't understand how this would even be considered for a legit feature of the client, how were they planning to pitch this? "Don't let your gpu sit idle! Why have working parts for the competition, when you could be making money the easy way!" I want to meet the genius who thought it would be a great idea to embed a mining app into procomp rigs.

the whole thing stinks of some greedy bitches trying to cover a huge fuckup, the stupid way. if anything they should've just claimed their distro was compromised. "lol my bad, april fools." really?
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Maybe premium benefits in exchange for using bitminer while you have the client open?
 
darrpara said:
Maybe premium benefits in exchange for using bitminer while you have the client open?
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hmmmm if you earn 1 bitcoin/month running the client (and that's a low amount if you have high end hardware) and a bitcoin is worth at least $50 and your electricity is going to be $75 (800 Watts * 24 hours * 30 days * $0.12/kWh) (providing you again have high end efficient hardware) That's $125/month you lost for a premium memebership. Even at 400 Watts (which would be very low power for a mining machine) you are losing $87/month.

I don't think so.
 
DeathPrincess said:
Didn't people notice their cards running more than usual? :confused:
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Seriously. Its not like Bitcoin mining only uses 5 percent of your GPU resources when in reality it maxes the fuck out of it (even more so on AMD cards). Hell the sound of your GPU fan at full throttle should be a gigantic hint that something wrong when this is happening for no reason...

I keep an eye on my computer resources constantly.

But this is a mega fucked up. More reason to have more than one person handling coding on your software so checks and balances are in place to prevent this kind of shit. Its called Q/C for a reason.
 
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