Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 693 posts

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#131

Post by modeless »

pjerem wrote: post #115
mrtksn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, tell me about it. +Installs Linux, this time determined to make it daily driver. Why is this so slow though? - You need to install Nvidia drivers + Oh, OK makes sense. -- INSTALLS NVIDIA DRIVERS -- -- LINUX NO LONGER BOOTS, OBSCURE ERROR MESSAGE, FURIOUSLY GOOGLING ON A TINY PHONE SCREEN TRYING TO RESOLVE THE ISSUE -- Later made myself a Hackintosh, eventually bought an actual Mac. The Hackintosh stuff was much,…

Interesting. I’ve not used Linux as my mainly driver for years. I miss it and I want to come back but I basically don’t have any decent PC anymore so I have the freedom to get/build one. When I used it, ironically, NVidia was the way to go on Linux and ATI/AMD was a shit show. Is AMD ok nowadays ? My needs are mostly confortable casual gaming where I don’t care having more than 60fps and I don’t play online (so this…

Despite my complaints, for casual gaming on a desktop you shouldn't have too many issues with Nvidia's drivers these days as long as you can use the ones packaged by your distro instead of Nvidia's installer. My troubles have mostly been associated with laptops that have both Intel and Nvidia graphics, or desktops used for ML training where the distro-packaged drivers wouldn't work for one reason or another.

I've heard AMD's drivers are OK these days but haven't tried them myself because I care about ML.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#132

Post by leereeves »

2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #109
travbrack wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are countries that don't care about US IP laws. China comes to mind.

And, with the current crisis in mind, Russia. They'll be looking to expanding their local semiconductor production from now on.

Having chip designs without a state of the art fab won't help them any more than having software without a computer would.

For China and Russia to replace TSMC they'd need TSMC's (and ASML's) secrets, as well as nVidia's.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#133

Post by blihp »

oofabz wrote: post #57
nojs wrote: post #8

> Nvidia introduced LHR in February 2021 with the launch of its GeForce RTX 3060 models. Three months later, the company brought LHR to its GeForce RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti graphics cards. The reason: to make the cards less desirable to people mining Ethereum and possibly other types of cryptocurrencies. What a bizarre move. Why would they do this?

It was an attempt to decrease demand for the cards, thereby reducing price. The simplest market solution to high demand and inadequate supply would be to raise the price of the cards. This would maximize short-term profits but Nvidia felt it was not the right strategic move. Why not? Here are some guesses: - pricing gamers out of the GPU market would damage Nvidia's historical market - video games - pricing AI users…

That argument falls apart when you realize that LHR didn't cripple nVidia's cards, it merely reduced their mining performance to being just a bit stronger (but still stronger) than AMD. Had they really wanted to kill miner interest in their cards they would have reduced hashing performance by something like 90% with LHR. I think all they were ever really trying to do was decrease the relative desirability of nVidia cards specifically by miners, not eliminate it entirely.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#134

Post by modeless »

akvadrako wrote: post #129
modeless wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the improvements Valve is making to Steam, Proton, and other areas along with game developers paying more attention to Linux compatibility will benefit all Linux users, not just Steam Deck users, and make Linux a more popular gaming platform even among people with Nvidia PCs. Yesterday I installed Steam on my Linux machine and downloaded a random game that has no Linux port and played it. It worked perfectly, jus…

How is that relevant to Nvidia GPU source code?

As stated upthread, "the argument is that driver source being open could help the (tiny!) Linux gaming community", and the further argument that the community will be getting larger and not only because of people using Steam Deck hardware.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#135

Post by DangitBobby »

DangitBobby wrote: post #114
bouncycastle wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't, and it's a very important technology since it's the only way for humans to store digital property without relying on some government or corporation. Also, it ever gets attacked, much more will be at stake, including your freedom for choosing what software can be run on your computer.

Cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. My software freedom is not dependent on the existence of cryptocurrencies. My hardware freedom is currently significantly hampered by them.

> Be on the side that empowers people with technology, not the side that wants to take it away.

I'm not really advocating for taking it away. I'm happy with a natural death or a market induced death. I'd definitely advocate for hardware that's terrible at mining because I'm not really being given a lot of options. You can't really say "freedom to use your hardware as you will" out of one side of your mouth while saying "you can't want hardware with restrictions" out of the other. It's a paradox. We both want the hardware that works for us, don't we? If NVidia can make cards that suck at mining, it's my economic freedom and right to choose to support that, and I would, just like it's your economic right and freedom to buy all hardware in existence to waste energy.

I can tell you 100% that cryptocurrencies are the opposite of empowering for me and those around me in my current life.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#136

Post by ranguna »

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #79
nharada wrote: post #10

> We decided to help mining and gaming community How does removing LHR help the gaming community?

Read the article? Nvidia released it to make GPUs less desirable to crypto miners so gamers can actually get their hands on some.

Read the OP's question ?

If "nvidia released it [LHR] to make GPUs less desirable to crypto miners", then, "How does removing LHR help the _gaming_ community?"

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#137

Post by ranguna »

codedokode wrote: post #112

I don't understand why gamers should have any priority over miners and programmers in access to video cards. Mining or computing is a serious business. Gaming is just a way to kill time and kids would get much more benefit if they read books or did sports instead. Also, gamers don't need top video cards, 1 or 2Gb cards are fine for most games. Therefore, all restrictions on hash rate should be removed.

I don't know in which world you live in, but gaming is a serious business as well. Specially the gaming community.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#138

Post by leereeves »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #110
leereeves wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for criminals and rogue states, certainly.

Sure, but also the dissident, someone fleeing a war zone, someone having their life savings destroyed by bankers and politicians… It’s ok if you don’t have a use for decentralized money. I hope you never need it, and continue a sheltered life of luxury and convenience.

Someone fleeing a war zone probably shouldn't depend on currencies that require Internet access.

For defending one's life savings, I'd recommend investing in productive enterprises rather than speculative and volatile get rich quick schemes, but to each their own.

For dissidents, crypto might be some small help, but not much. (For example, crypto did help WikiLeaks accept donations, but Julian Assange is still in prison.) Even with cryptocurrency, dissidents still need to reveal themselves in the act of protest.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#139

Post by larsrc »

schappim wrote: post #59
squarefoot wrote: post #4

I would rather outlaw cryptocurrencies for being a harm for the planet with their crazy energy demands, besides also fueling criminals.

Would seem to be a rather misinformed comment even to a crypto-layperson. I’m surprised we don’t have a chorus of cyptofiles informing you that crypto emits less greenhouse gases than the traditional banking system, and there are coins/tokens that don’t require melting chips to establish proof of work. I can’t talk to the use of crypto currencies for crime, but I would be surprised if the total volume of transactions…

A couple of million transactions per day: https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b...

That's less than the number of private transactions in a moderately sized city, never mind business or financial transactions.

Random comparison: NASDAQ alone sees 30-40 million transactions per day. http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=DailyMarketSummar...

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#140

Post by Blammar »

chmod775 wrote: post #5

> So, NVIDIA, the choice is yours! Either: Officially make current and all future drivers for all cards open source, while keeping the Verilog and chipset trade secrets... well, secret OR Not make the drivers open source, making us release the entire silicon chip files so that everyone not only knows your driver's secrets, but also your most closely-guarded trade secrets for graphics and computer chipsets too! Intere…

I can suggest a good reason why the Nvidia GPU drivers are opaque binary blobs.

Generally speaking, you don't build a multi-billion transistor chip, and manage to ship the A01 spin without doing some magic.

The Nvidia GPU i/o interface is a remarkable mechanism where the resource manager (the code that sits at the very lowest level) can patch the hardware interface to get around hardware issues and give the appearance of a chip that is working perfectly.

I'm not claiming the blobs work well or anything. I'm just saying there's a reason Nvidia does blobs.

Typically, an A01 chip will ship with about 50 bugs that are worked around in the resource manager and driver. They really do not want to tell you about these bugs -- because they are WORKED AROUND. You don't need to see the sausage made, so to speak.

Post reply on HN