blog We know the ABC is a public broadcaster and isn’t likely to be offering the highest salaries in the world, but this is ridiculous. The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that one of Aunty’s IT workers set up a system to use its vast server resources to make himself wealthy by generating uncounted Bitcoins — the controversial virtual currency. The story was originally published in Crikey’s ‘tips and rumours’ section:

“Bitcoins, as Crikey explained on Monday, is an online-only currency system quickly increasing in value. And one ABC staffer has apparently cashed in, in a serious IT breach Crikey understands is being investigated by the national broadcaster.”

We can’t decide if the un-named ABC IT staffer is a petty criminal or a genius sysadmin bent on making it big with spare CPU cycles. Likely the second — which would probably make him chaotic neutral in type — a most dangerous character ;)

Image credit: Mateusz Stachowski, royalty free

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1. LK-
   Posted 23/06/2011 at 5:36 pm | Permalink | Reply

   If only I had access to Google’s servers..

2. Thateus
   Posted 23/06/2011 at 5:49 pm | Permalink | Reply

   You need GPU’s otherwise with a plain old CPU it’s pretty slow going.

   • Matt McLeod
     Posted 23/06/2011 at 6:02 pm | Permalink | Reply

     I would imagine that this guy was able to scale it over hundreds of machines, none of which he (or she?) was paying for, so it’s pretty much all “profit”.

     Back in the day I had to deal with a developer who’d taken advantage of the rather idiotic policy at that organisation of mandating open rsh access to all UNIX systems by running one of the distributed crypto-cracker tools across approximately one thousand servers and workstations. I recall wishing at the time that he’d put half as much effort into distributing the rather large builds our software dev people were running every night…

3. Matthew Hatton
   Posted 23/06/2011 at 9:33 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Is it just me, or does Bitcoin just seem like a waste of time?

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 23/06/2011 at 10:18 pm | Permalink | Reply

     I think eventually it, or something very like it, won’t be a waste of time ;)

     • Brian D
       Posted 24/06/2011 at 2:48 am | Permalink | Reply

       The AOT laughs in your general direction.

   • PuZZleDucK
     Posted 23/05/2012 at 1:51 pm | Permalink | Reply

     A lot of “hard-coin” users scoffed at the idea of a piece of paper representing currency some time ago. I don’t know about you but for me there is only about 2-3 things a month I need hard currency for now days, bring on the virtual: just as “real” as paper notes but a lot lighter to carry and harder to destroy.

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