SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Tim Hornyak reports that National Science Foundation (NSF) has banned a researcher for using supercomputer resources to generate bitcoin. According to the semiannual report to Congress by the NSF Office of Inspector General, the computationally intensive mining used about $150,000 worth of NSF-supported computer use at the two universities to generate bitcoins worth about $8,000 to $10,000 (PDF). The universities told the NSF that the work was unauthorized, reporting that the researcher accessed the computers remotely, even using a mirror site in Europe, possibly to conceal his identity. "The researcher's access to all NSF-funded supercomputer resources was terminated," the office wrote. "In response to our recommendation, NSF suspended the researcher government-wide."
The incident follows a similar case in February in which a researcher at Harvard University was caught using supercomputer resources to mine dogecoin. The researcher was barred from accessing the computer resources.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 11 2014, @03:12PM
Here's what I know about government contracting:
- I know that in my county government, the way it happened for years was that any would-be contractors had to first do work for free on the home of the county commissioner, and then would be awarded contracts without a whole lot of checking on whether any work was getting done. This was all determined in a court of law.
- I know that in another area of my state, the Congressman got a large campaign contribution from a defense supplier in the area. Said Congressman then snuck into a bill a requirement that the US Army buy a lot of what said defense supplier was making, despite the fact that the army didn't want any more of what they were selling.
- I know of at least one case where the RFP was carefully worded in such a way that only one company could possibly fulfill the requirements, and the person who worded the RFP in that way left government work for a very nice $300K a year job at that single company.
So yeah, I'm not saying all government contracting is corrupt, but a lot of it is. I understand that there are safeguards and Inspectors General and the like, but I also understand that there are lots and lots of people doing everything they can to get around those safeguards, because there's just a huge enough pile of money available that corruption is inevitable.
This isn't unique to government: Corporations that are large enough for executives to have significant departmental budgets and/or a purchasing department run into exactly the same sorts of problems, because it's so darn profitable for individuals to look the other way even if the corporation as a whole would get hurt by it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.