US regulators have smacked games biz ESEA with a $1m fine for surreptitiously installing a Bitcoin miner in its software.The settlement was announced on Tuesday and means ESEA gaming will pay the state of New Jersey $325,000 of its $1m fine upfront, and the rest will be scrubbed if the company has a clean record for the next ten years.The company had 'fessed up in May to an employee using "test code for his own personal gain" to install a GPU-based Bitcoin miner on ESEA game software deployed across 14,000 PCs.That employee was fired, and the company poured the $3,700 worth of Bitcoins into a prize pot for its gaming clientele, and donated $7,427.10 to the American Cancer Society."At the very least your melted GPUs contributed to a good cause," wrote chief Eric Thunberg in the forum at the time.Though this was an effective mea culpa, the state regulators have decided to make an example out of the company, and so have fined it almost a hundred times the value of its ill-gotten funny money.

"This case should serve as a message that we are committed to protecting New Jersey consumers, and that we will hold accountable anyone who seeks to exploit them through misleading claims, deceptive practices or the invasion of their computer privacy," said acting attorney general John Hoffman in a press release.Unfortunately for ESEA, much of the regulator's announcement seems to misinterpret the way the ESEA client software worked, and levels allegations of privacy compromise at it as well, which ESEA disputes."The press release issued by the Attorney General about our settlement represents a deep misunderstanding of the facts of the case, the nature of our business, and the technology in question," ESEA wrote."Moving forward, it is our intent to provide our community with confidence that ESEA will be taking every possible step to protect your privacy."The company plans to roll out a new section on its website that clearly outlines its privacy policy, and is going to conduct regular audits with a "third party specialist" to make sure ESEA is secure.

But given the vertiginous rise of Bitcoin in recent months (at the time of writing, Bitcoins on MT Gox were trading for around $600 apiece, compared to around $130 in May) we reckon the temptation by people to splice miners into client software will only grow over time.Watch your GPU utilization, folks.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."can litecoin beat bitcoinUltimately, 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.""Theschweizer bitcoin börseowners 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.ethereum cold storage

"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."Inan 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.bitcoin cairoESEA will also match 100% of this amount for a total of $7,427.10 donated.bitcoin cuanto vale en dolaresESEA is also increasing the Season 14 League prize pot by $3,713.55."ethereum build instructionsOriginal Story: Multiplayer eSports network ESEA was found to have malware in its anti-cheat client, which used users' graphics cards to mine for Bitcoins.bbc bitcoin exchange

Information about the exploit was posted to the ESEA's forums by user "ENJOY ESEA SHEEP", who found he had been unwittingly farming Bitcoins for someone in the community after noticing excessively high idle GPU usage.Mining is the legitimate, and deliberately system-intensive process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger - generating Bitcoins for the miner in the process.The ESEA client had been pooling the GPUs of users in order to generate more money for wallets held by ESEA staff.ESEA co-founder Eric 'lpkane' Thunberg responded to the accusation, initially claiming it was a mistakenly released April Fool's joke.bitcoin vacation rentalHis first statement is kind of amazing: "Lol that got aggressive quickly.litecoin mining software download"Back towards the end of march, as BTC was skyrocketing, Jaguar and I were talking about how cool it would be if we could use massive amounts of GPUs logged into the client to mine."We

went back and forth about it, considered doing something for April fools, didn't get it done in time, and eventually elected to put some test code in the client and try it on a few admin accounts, ours included."Weran the test for a few days on our accounts, decided it wasn't worth the potential drama, and pulled the plug, or so we thought."Fastforward to 48 hours ago, a fuck up in the client server results in a restart which results in a setting getting changed which enables it for all idle users, and here we are."Thunbergclaimed the combined efforts of ESEA users' unaware mining netted them roughly 2BTC, or $280, which he promised would be put towards the Season 14 prize pot.He returned with a second statement a few hours later, after users pointed out that anti-viruses had been flagging the client for longer than the claimed 48 hours.He admits the mining had been part of the client since 14th April, and that the overall money mined totaled $3,602.21, before going to say: "So first the bad news, this is way more shady than I originally thought, and as the person who is ultimately responsible for everything it's 100% my fault.