挖 Ethereum 加熱房間...

大家都好像有過類似的想法,只是實際去做的不多 XDDD

有人把整個作法寫出來,挖 Ethereum 加熱房間:「How I heat my home by mining crypto currencies」。

從網站上的「About me」這邊看起來應該是住在奧地利?

I am a tech geek from Austin TX (USA), living on the country side in Austria and devote most of my time to my girlfriend, my company, my students and different projects.

不確定是哪個城市,先抓了首都維也納的溫度來看,看起來一到三月的平均氣溫都在個位數 (攝氏),可以理解暖氣應該是常備物品:

作者之前就先搞過一個可以一路接到 Grafana 的電錶,然後也有裝太陽能電板,但因為暖氣用電的關係而不夠用:

After building my own smart meter using 4$ in parts I started checking my electricity usage every day, which made me realize how expensive it is to heat your home. Especially since all heat and warm water in my low-energy house is made with electricity. I do have 4.8 kwp solar panels on my roof but in winter they don't cover too much for obvious reasons.

順便查了一下電價,在「Austria electricity prices」這頁可以看到奧地利的每一度要 USD$0.248:

而同一份資料上,台灣是 USD$0.101:

回到他的暖氣機,他是屬於中央空調大台機器的類型:

這種機器會恆溫輸出,所以是進風溫度愈低,就需要使用愈高的電能加熱。所以他想到的解法就是針對進風口預先用顯卡挖礦加熱 (四張 AMD 的 R9 390),這樣就可以降低暖氣機的電力消耗 (不過整體的消耗會提昇):

I had 4 older AMD R9 390 GPUs laying around (for the nVidia crowd that's basically on a level with a GTX 970) and I thought it could work.

後面就是改裝過程了,最後的結果雖然整體的電力使用量上升,但因為暖氣機的電力消耗降低,加上礦機挖到的 ETH 直接 cover 暖氣機的費用,反而讓暖氣機變免費了:

Success! I was able to lower my heat pump's electricity needs by ~50% and half of the costs are also paid for by the mining earnings

台灣的氣溫應該是用不太到 XDDD

最近討論頗多的 NordVPN

最近 NordVPN 的隱私問題被拿出來討論的蠻凶的,應該是從「Is NordVPN a Honeypot?」這篇開始的...

作者一開始就有提到並不只有 NordVPN,而是整個 VPN 產業其實都有類似的情況,只是現在可以找到比較多證據可以推測 NordVPN 後面並不單純。

首先是 NordVPN 買了大量評論,後來被發現是假的而被移除,而移除後的分數掉了非常多。再來是 NordVPN 居然花了五十萬美金在 CNN 的廣告上,這對於 VPN 產業的成本來說很不可思議...

另外一個是 NordVPN 的母公司 Tesonet 就是做 data mining 的,「整理」各種資料拿出來賣的...

基本上這類服務只能拿來翻牆用 (翻進日本或是翻進美國),不要認為隱私性有多高... 需要隱私還是得透過其他方式降低風險 (沒辦法完全保護,只能降低)。

分析 FCC 對網路中立性的留言,將鄉民與機器人分開來分析

Boing Boing 的立場其實還蠻鮮明的,所以有時候他們的新聞看看就好...

但這篇真的很有趣,把 FCC (美國的聯邦通信委員會) 上兩千兩百萬則對網路中立性的留言拿出來分析,結果發現真人與機器人的差異超明顯 XDDD:「Analysis of 22 million FCC comments show that humans love Net Neutrality and bots really, really hate it」,引用的文章在「Discovering truth through lies on the internet - FCC comments analyzed」這邊。

分析可以發現,真人偏好網路中立,而機器人反對網路中立 XDDD:(其實大家心裡都有底是怎麼玩出來的... 只是這次有機會分析,讓事情更明顯)

Data analysis company Gravwell ingested 22,000,000 comments sent to the FCC's docket on Net Neutrality and posted their preliminary findings, which are that the majority of comments came from bots, and these bots oppose Net Neutrality; of the comments that appear to originate with humans, the vast majority favor Net Neutrality.

文章中列出幾個有趣的現象,像是機器人的 comment 大量重複:

A very small minority of comments are unique -- only 17.4% of the 22,152,276 total. The highest occurrence of a single comment was over 1 million.

甚至是 pornhub.com 的郵件位置 XDDD:

Most comments were submitted in bulk and many come in batches with obviously incorrect information -- over 1,000,000 comments in July claimed to have a pornhub.com email address

然後機器人的 pattern 也很容易辨別:

Bot herders can be observed launching the bots -- there are submissions from people living in the state of "{STATE}" that happen minutes before a large number of comment submissions

這個有點類似「50 Cent Party (五毛黨)」,但是是自動化機器人,而且產出的「品質」不太好 XDDD

Bitcoin 有單一團體超過 50% 計算能力了...

Bitcoin 的安全性是利用「當整個社群夠大時,不會有單一團體擁有超過 50% 的計算能力」的假設上發展演算法及防護機制:(參考「Weaknesses - Bitcoin」)

An attacker that controls more than 50% of the network's computing power can, for the time that he is in control, exclude and modify the ordering of transactions. This allows him to:

  • Reverse transactions that he sends while he's in control. This has the potential to double-spend transactions that previously had already been seen in the block chain.
  • Prevent some or all transactions from gaining any confirmations
  • Prevent some or all other miners from mining any valid blocks

不過讓人噴飯的消息出來了,即使在 Bitcoin 這麼火熱的情況下,仍然有單一團體計算能力已經超過 50%:「Largest Bitcoin Mining Pool Pledges Not To Execute '51% Attack'」。

這應該是當設計時始料未及的... XD