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A gentleman in the southeast orange-growing state was caught and accused of mining cryptocurrency at work, according to the Tampa Bay Times:
TAMPA — A Department of Citrus employee was arrested after he used state computers to produce virtual currency for himself, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Matthew McDermott, 51, of Davenport was the information technology manager for the Florida Department of Citrus, the agency that oversees the state's citrus industry... [H]e used several computers in the Department of Citrus to mine for virtual currency, which include bitcoin and litecoin.
He wasn't just mining--he was allegedly really, really into it, to the tune of tens of thousands of Department of Citrus dollars:
Utility bills for the department jumped by more than 40 percent between October 2017 and January 2017, at a cost of about $825... McDermott also spent more than $22,000 using a state purchasing card between July and December, [buying] 24 graphic processing units, the FDLE said.
"Grand Theft" and "Official Misconduct" were his charges upon arrest. With bail set at just $5,000 (less than 1 BTC), he probably made bail pretty quickly.
It seems that mining cryptocurrency is the new en vogue temptation scandal.
Also at The Week, whose story mentions the previous incident at Russian nuclear facilities.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @09:08AM (7 children)
What about the people that print 'foreign jobs' on the company printer. Or borrow the company car for a weekend away. Or charge their phones/bikes/cars at work. Morning ablutions after you arrive at the office. And my all time favourite, taking a shit on company time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @09:26AM
Used to work in a team with a guy like that. Meeting Mick didn't like? Yeah, he's on the loo.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @01:05PM (2 children)
Unfortunately that is the most productive thing some of these people do all day.
(Score: 3, Funny) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday March 15 2018, @01:30PM (1 child)
True story: A friend of mine was a mechanic working at a union shop. Some of the guys took advantage of union benefits and would slack off in various ways.
One guy would disappear to "go to the bathroom" for a couple hours during the day. He'd take magazines, crossword puzzles, books, etc. with him to the bathroom.
Some other guys were annoyed at him, so my friend gathered some pairs of old work boots, some works pants, and set up fake "guys in the restroom" in all the bathroom stalls. The lazy guy was really confused by it all for a day, since he couldn't find a place to waste time. (My friend shifted the boots etc. occasionally to make it believable. He himself would run to the bathroom when he saw the guy heading there, just to make some grunting and make it all look real.)
The next day my friend started having some fun with him (weirder noises etc.) -- culminating in two pairs of boots and pants in a single stall facing each other... Apparently freaked the guy out temporarily. Though he didn't know who played the prank. (IIRC, he tried calling a supervisor to come look in, but all the boots miraculous disappeared.)
After that, the guy stopped his long bathroom visits, though he found other ways to waste time of course.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 16 2018, @12:42AM
Where I work now, personal phones are strictly verboten. But going into the restrooms, because of the way the lighting is laid out you can see the shadows of forearms and thumbs twiddling phones cast across the floor, and you don't need to be creepy or nosey to see how obvious it is.
Although it's not my style to fuck off in the bathroom (or at all if I can avoid it, because the harder you work the faster the workday goes), I did have the peculiar habit of taking a section of newspaper from the break room and reading it as long as the kids were ready to be dropped off at the pool. The crinkle of turning the pages of a newspaper is a very distinctive and not so subtle sound, and even with others in there I didn't give a fuck. Since I preferred to shit like a king in the handicapped stall, I often left that section of newspaper draped neatly over the handrail after I was done so that people too poor to afford a data plan could have something to read.
It was a fun bit of trivia to see how long throughout the day the section of newspaper lasted in there. Providing hard-copy material to read at home for your shitting guests is one of those weird polite/unpolite things that even the most uptight prude won't hold against anybody.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by requerdanos on Thursday March 15 2018, @03:19PM (2 children)
A couple foreign jobs on the printer are inexpensive and help serve to keep the worker in the work environment (even if not explicitly permitted). Anyone who makes $22875 worth of printing over the space of a few months is, on the other hand, stealing in the "grand theft" felony range.
Charging your bike, phone, laptop, flashlight, power tools, or car at work? Again, inexpensive things that help serve to keep the worker in the work environment (even if not explicitly permitted). Doesn't cost $22875 over the life of any single worker, or indeed any department full of workers.
That worker also costs incidental amounts on the power bill for things like lighting that reaches his eyes, heating or air conditioning that reaches his skin, and water that he drinks and that carries away his waste products. A few bucks to a few hundred bucks of this per worker is different in a fundamental way from $22875 of this per worker, even if it may be alike in other superficial ways.
Borrowing the company car can be more problematic, with laws against "taking without permission", but the expense is still upkeep of the car per mile times number of miles in the trip, arguably pretty small in the grand scheme of things. $22875 expenses in car-borrowing, on the other hand, more problematic. It's a matter of proportion.
Imo it's like the difference between someone walking across your yard vs. someone building a highway across your property. Sure, they're nominally alike, but there are differences that outweigh the similarities.
A car analogy may help. It's sort of like the difference between someone touching your car ("Hey! Get away from there!") and crushing your car for scrap ("Hey! That wasn't my car, was it?!"). One does not suck out significant value, but the other does.
I'm trying to make it sound simple, but I don't have all the answers. For example, I once worked for a state government agency at which members of an NGO/non-profit group used our government equipment to print all materials (foreign jobs indeed) for a conference their group regularly held in a state government building. I still haven't untangled that one.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @06:22PM
You need to go back to the old place.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 16 2018, @12:51AM
I've seen people print entire color booklets for things unrelated to work. Recreational groups associated with ladies, mostly, but most notably stuff from the Vietnamese guy who went crazy. He would print huge half-ream tomes of barely-Romanized moon-runes and with shifty eyes hold them tightly against his chest with both arms before scurrying them back to his workbench. Don't know why he had to call attention to himself like that given that the printer was at the center of the well-lit department where others were printing and headed over to the printer all the time. "Oh, hey Min Le Guc Dong, I think I got a redline drawing under that fat stack of yours. Mind handing it to me?"
Poor dude was an American sympathizer and later refugee who was thrown in a political prison by the NVA and told he was never going to be released for the rest of his life. Guess you can't just forget a thing like that.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Hyper on Thursday March 15 2018, @09:29AM (24 children)
If you ran Seti@home or folding@home on a work computer
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lentilla on Thursday March 15 2018, @09:59AM (13 children)
Odd how ethics change with societal mores - a decade ago running folding@home would have been perfectly acceptable, and likely something that would make the boss think "a little odd, but; I have to hand it to them; if running some weird software keeps them enthusiastic then who am I to quibble?"
(Score: 4, Informative) by krishnoid on Thursday March 15 2018, @10:16AM (7 children)
I'll bet you half the delta on those cards [arstechnica.com] the department could turn around and sell them for a nice profit over what the card was charged for (if they act quickly).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @10:41AM (4 children)
And then pay tax on the income, and calculate costs of electrify and pay someone a working wage to do this and accounting and legal fees....is it worth it?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday March 15 2018, @01:30PM (3 children)
Electricity is a sunk cost, as is the purchase of the cards. At this point it's a question of how much of the wasted wealth an be recovered. So is $22,000 plus appreciation worth the wages and accounting of selling them? I'd guess probably yes.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday March 15 2018, @06:15PM (1 child)
Electricity is a sunk cost
No it isn't! You pay more if you use more. That's the opposite of a sunk cost.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday March 15 2018, @08:13PM
Presumably they're no longer running the bitcoin miner - so the electricity already used is a sunk cost, along with every other expense that has already been incurred. Electricity used today is an ongoing expense - electricity used yesterday is a sunk cost.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 15 2018, @08:55PM
In a sane organization: yes. In the State bureaucracy, it might cost $22,000 in meetings and deliberations to decide where the recovered funds and profits (if any) actually go.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday March 15 2018, @06:27PM
If it had been aprivate company, they could have organized a nice game tournament as their next team-building exercise.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Friday March 16 2018, @07:40AM
Very interesting post! Thanks!
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @10:45AM
Our boss started it. All the school PCs ran it
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 15 2018, @11:44AM (3 children)
As long as they're not charging $22K for additional FAH equipment...
The $825 increase in electric bill might have been overlooked without the capital purchase (however, without the capital purchase, I imagine the increase in electric bill would have been much smaller....)
"Old school" office PCs used somewhere in the neighborhood of 100W (+/- 30%), so with Florida electric power rates around $0.11/kWh, that's around $100 per year per PC for 24x7x365 on-time. Your average tech-nerd might have a half-dozen machines on their desk humming away, so that's hardly worth making a fuss over.
However, employees who break out the company card to purchase $22K worth of new and un-needed gear for the purpose of personal monetary gain - that's gotta get nipped in the bud, frozen back before it spreads, quarantined and burned out like canker.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @02:58PM
$100 per PC per year for a normal work desktop. You need to up that number quite a bit when you put a modern, high wattage GPU card in that machine and run it full blast 24/7/365.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Thursday March 15 2018, @07:47PM (1 child)
This article reminds me that I need to run a report of all of my procurement cards and look for this kind of thing... I am going to do some victim blaming here though about the lack of good internal controls. We cap pcard transactions at 5k (asset threshold) and everything less than that must go through the requisition process. There are easy ways to monitor this kind of thing year round that should be in place, hopefully florida learns from this and implements protections.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 15 2018, @08:51PM
State, Department of Citrus... unlikely. More likely for some politicians to yell at the higher level managers to keep a closer eye, and then continue with business as usual.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @10:08AM
Seize the means of computation!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by den Os on Thursday March 15 2018, @03:17PM
Our old alpha based computers running VMS did not have power management on the cpu's, So running seti@home while the processor was idle didn't cost any additional electricity.
(Score: 4, Informative) by requerdanos on Thursday March 15 2018, @03:21PM (1 child)
No. Hands up if you bought $22,000 worth of GPUs to run the GPU-assisted version of Whatever@home on every computer in your department.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @10:19PM
Going for the nice old fashioned "burn spare cpu cycles" there. ..not the "buy a new computer to commit fraud" obviously
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @05:26PM
With SETI@home we provided computation for humanity's benefit. These fools stealing work resources to mine buttcoin are doing it for personal gain.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday March 15 2018, @06:34PM
Folding this exact minute. Pretty much started folding as soon as the new 4K monitor required a discrete video card, which has essentially nothing else to do than push 2D pixels.
Compared to the lab equipment, the electric draw is negligible, and paid by the landlord, who doesn't seem to mind the aforementioned lab (not sure how much they pay per kWh, for the whole building, and the car charger in front).
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Thursday March 15 2018, @07:58PM
Shoot, I ran the DESCHALL client on several work computers back in 1997. And this was a hospital. It was a different time.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday March 15 2018, @08:35PM (2 children)
I knew someone who was fired for running seti@home on a work computer, does that count?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 15 2018, @09:02PM (1 child)
I knew someone who was fired for some other reason that was not a legitimate basis for firing, but running seti@home on a work computer was something they could put in writing on the discharge form, does that count?
Grocery store I worked for provides "free, no tipping" carry out service. Except, in the neighborhood I worked in, all the customers tipped - and even got upset if you refused the tips. So, at that store, when management wanted to fire anyone, they'd put them on package duty then go catch them accepting a tip. Base pay was around $5-7/hr there, and the average tip for carry out was $1 (much higher around Christmas), so tips amounted to over half of actual income - especially after taxes; everybody, including management when doing package duty, took the tips.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 16 2018, @03:27PM
It could if you're looking for reasons to deny unemployment or not in a right-to-work state. Misuse of equipment is certainly a disciplinable event.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Funny) by lentilla on Thursday March 15 2018, @09:53AM (3 children)
Looks like he juiced his position for all that he could.
(Score: 4, Funny) by cocaine overdose on Thursday March 15 2018, @10:14AM
And mining BTC and LTC? What, did he hear his grandson say how he made $20 doing nothing?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @10:55AM
If I had mod points I would pound you for that flat pune
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @11:37AM
There's a market for "proof of juice" tokens.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 15 2018, @11:36AM (7 children)
What I want to know is: with $22K invested in additional hardware, and a purported $825 increase in electricity bill, what was his actual yield at the time of mining? Did he even get $800 worth of currency during the period in question?
Any time I have looked into mining, it has been near break-even to cheaper to just buy the coin outright - if you're paying for your own mining gear and power.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by KritonK on Thursday March 15 2018, @12:41PM (3 children)
It seems to me that mining for cryptocurrencies makes sense only if you are doing it on someone else's expense, which makes it equivalent to stealing.
Back in my day, when CPUs ran at a constant speed, using idle time to run tasks in the background made a lot of sense: instead of wasting electricity, when you weren't using the computer, you could use the CPU to do some interesting task. These days, CPUs enter a reduced power state, when they aren't running anything, so this no longer the case.
Breaking even sounds about right, however. If you need x amount of resources, to produce x amount of currency, this gives currency its value, as it represents the resources that were used to produce it. If anyone with a computer can produce currency at a cost that is less than its value, then who would want to buy that currency? They'd just print... I mean mine their own. You don't see governments printing money, whenever they run out, do you? Oh, wait...
(Score: 1) by cwadge on Thursday March 15 2018, @07:19PM (2 children)
The x86 (going back to the 8086 with various levels of functionality) featured the "HLT" state which, when called at idle, could significantly reduce CPU power consumption. Unfortunately DOS didn't support it until 6.0, but regardless it's been around a pretty long time. Of course modern techniques, including frequency scaling, are much more efficient. But your CPU definitely used less juice at idle from about '93 onward. ;-)
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Thursday March 15 2018, @08:16PM (1 child)
FTFY
Alpha, 68k, MIPS, 6502, PowerPC -- These guys were all on the market in the early 90's and always ran at FULL BORE regardless of if there was any work to do. My God, what a glorious time in computing...
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 1) by cwadge on Friday March 16 2018, @01:07AM
x86 is a usually safe assumption, but you're absolutely right. Man, technology moved so much faster back then. Every year seemed like a quantum leap in processing power, graphics, sound, peripherals... by comparison it feels like we're stuck in a technological rut today.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Thursday March 15 2018, @02:00PM (1 child)
I'm interested in this too, that was the first question that popped into my mind: so with all those gizmos, how much money did that actually bring in? I know it's not his money that he spent, but it would interesting to know how much that would give you and when you could expect to break even with that amount of investment. The other thing is how does that electricity bill represent in terms of consumption? Is electricity cheap in that state?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 15 2018, @05:08PM
I don't know where in Florida he is, but most of Florida that I've lived in hovers around ~$0.11/kWh - not California peak terrible, but not Iceland cheap, either.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday March 15 2018, @03:27PM
If he was GPU mining Bitcoin, which is only profitable with ASIC miners and not always profitable then, then he's almost guaranteed to have mined pretty much nothing.
But what was he mining? The article doesn't exactly say.
It says he used government computers "to mine for virtual currency, which include bitcoin and litecoin."
Does it say that because the set "virtual currency" contains members "Bitcoin" and "Litecoin", which it does?
Or because he was actually mining Bitcoin and Litecoin?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @09:48PM
... Whatever he does, no one should do!