hypnosec writes “The E-Sports Entertainment Association (ESEA) gaming league has admitted to embedding Bitcoin mining code inside the league’s client software. It began as an April Fools’ Day joke idea, but the code ended up mining as many as 29 Bitcoins, worth over $3,700, for ESEA in a span of two weeks. According to Eric Thunberg, one of the league’s administrators, the mining code was included as early as April. Tests were run for a few days, after which they ‘decided it wasn’t worth the potential drama, and pulled the plug, or so we thought.’ The code was discovered by users after they noticed that their GPUs were working away with unusually high loads over the past two weeks. After users started posting on the ESEA forums about discovery of the Bitcoin mining code, Thunberg acknowledged the existence of a problem – a mistake caused a server restart to enable it for all idle users.” ESEA posted an apology and offered a free month of their Premium service to all players affected by the mining. They’ve also provided data dumps of the Bitcoin addresses involved and donated double the USD monetary value of the mined coins to the American Cancer Society. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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E-Sports League Stuffed Bitcoin Mining Code Inside Client Software
Nerval’s Lobster writes “Back in January, when Wolfram Alpha launched an updated version of its Personal Analytics for Facebook module, the self-billed ‘computational knowledge engine’ asked users to contribute their detailed Facebook data for research purposes. The researchers at Wolfram Alpha, having crunched all that information, are now offering some data on how users interact with Facebook. For starters, the median number of ‘friends’ is 342, with the average number of friends peaking for those in their late teens before declining at a steady rate. Younger people also have a tendency to largely add Facebook friends around their own age — for example, someone who’s 20 might have lots of friends in the twenty-something range, and comparatively few in other decades of life—while middle-aged people tend to have friends across the age spectrum. Beyond that, the Wolfram Alpha blog offers up some interesting information about friend counts (and ‘friend of friend’ counts), how friends’ networks tend to ‘cluster’ around life events such as school and sports teams, and even how peoples’ postings tend to evolve as they get older — as people age, for example, they tend to talk less about video games and more about politics. ‘It feels like we’re starting to be able to train a serious “computational telescope” on the “social universe,”‘ the blog concluded. ‘And it’s letting us discover all sorts of phenomena.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
iComp sends this quote from El Reg: “PayPal, Google Wallet and other online payment systems face higher transaction fees from MasterCard in retaliation for their refusal to share data on what people are spending. Visa is likely to follow suit. The amount that PayPal has to pay MasterCard for every transaction will go up as the latter introduces new charges for intermediated payment processors. This change is on the grounds that such processors don’t share transaction details, which the card giants would love to get hold of as it can be used to research buying patterns and the like. Companies such as PayPal allow payments between users, so the party (perhaps a merchant) receiving the money doesn’t need to be registered with the credit-card company. PayPal collects the dosh from the payer’s card, and deducts a processing fee before passing the cash on to the receiving party. MasterCard would prefer the receiver to be registered directly so will apply the new fee from June to any payment that is staged in this way.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Apple will supply the Pentagon with iOS devices as part of a new contract, a new report says. [Read more]