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?

I’m talking about the firewall which is network handling only.

Most host firewalls only block incoming traffic.

All you have to do is get all mining data by making outgoing web connections to some random proxy, which can optionally have a domain to look more legit.

Firewall won’t care, and unless you’re pouring over the logs or looking at active connections, you won’t find it either.

Since it’s mining software, the fastest giveaway would be high usage or running an anti-virus to find sketchy executables.

I’m assuming OP is on windows which means the installer asked for admin perms to install to program files which is a really easy way to hide your mining executable assuming it hasn’t been fingerprinted by popular anti virus yet.

Hey, thanks for that link! I’m really glad to have the details so I can verify for myself.

However, with that, I can REALLY confirm this is not an issue inherent to the DODI repack. DODI’s is what I’m using and I have none of that on my system – I checked with that powershell command, then also followed along with the comments to check other files and scheduled tasks that were mentioned.

That said, I got my download from torrentleech. I suspect a tainted version of the repack got onto certain other sites. It wouldn’t be the first time (which is why I specify trusted sites and uploaders in addition to release groups).