Originally posted over on /r/piracy (https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/15itrip/1337x_admins_allowing_bg3_torrent_with_bitcoin/)
It looks like a bitcoin miner was included in the installer, and the admins on 1337x may or may not give a shit apparently. Scanned my pc and my wifes and found the same stuff the others mentioned.
According to the other comments, don’t feel the need to uninstall as the miner was installed separate to the game, just give a Malwarebytes scan to get rid of the junk.
It’s even worse apparently. Apparently someone looked at where the coins are going, and the coins are going to the 1337x admins, and the uploader is just getting a cut of those coins. Which explains why the admins are unlikely to really care because they’re profiting off their users.
I have severe trust issues with any kind of pirated software so I basically never download it as a result, and shit like this is why. Even private trackers and “trusted” groups aren’t enough for me to download most software.
Do you have any evidence of that?
can we get some proof? this is really interesting. I’d like to see how they’re tracking stuff
How did they figure that out?
Crytpo isn’t inherently anonymous. you can easily follow coins.
Yeah. Unless you use a tumbler (and even then) crypto is actually less anonymous than traditional banking due to all being public record.
Obligatory plug for Monero.
…Which is a huge fucking hassle to try and use, IMO.
I haven’t been following monero too much but… I would not count on their protections to matter all that much. Because you can bet the FBI/CIA/NSA equivalents around the world have put in the effort to de-obfuscate that. Because this is a relatively low cost grant to a few grad students that means they can do whatever investigations they want without needing the equivalent of a warrant and cooperation from other orgs.
I am an old fart. But I definitely remember getting some DOD grants to work on a specific architecture (that never had widespread release) with mysterious instructions that I now understand map to common operations in cryptography (of the era). I got some nice papers about graph analysis and they got some very valuable ability to handle complex networks of interactions.
Tangential, but Real Genius is probably still the greatest media portrayal of STEM grad school in existence. You have those weird social interactions (because people with people skills already have real jobs) and those fucked up relationships (… hopefully not statutory rape…). But you are either a dumbass Believer or you rapidly grow to understand the inherent ethical concerns of your field of study. And as much as you wish you could take the weapon you accidentally made for the military and blow up a prop house with popcorn… the reality is that you end up closer to Lazlo and live with the realization that people are probably suffering and dying for your work for the rest of your life. And it is up to you on whether that manifests as alcoholism or activism.
What about it was a hassle for you?
You can follow the wallet address , but unles you know who the address belongs to, you can’t follow it. So we ask again, where the proof that the coins went to site admins?