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

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

#151

Post by eru »

randomsilence wrote: post #117
ehnto wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some practical way to delineate the two product usages that isn't arbitrary I wonder? Maybe make mining only cards more performant and affordable than consumer graphics cards, so that consumer cards will drop in price from less demand? I find it hard to believe that a use case specific device wouldn't be able to dethrone graphics cards as the better choice for miners at the right price, and it should be chea…

You would have to saturate the market with specific mining devices. Like with bitcoin ASIC miners, the crypto mining demands have to increase to the point where using gaming graphic cards becomes unprofitable. Otherwise miners will buy the specific mining devices and the gaming devices. The problem is that Etherum was designed to resist ASIC approaches. Instead of locking cards down, Nvidia could manage the supply. T…

> If their performance stats don't improve after the purchase, which means they have resold their hardware, they won't be allowed to buy another card.

And then you have people who lose their cards, or it gets damaged, or who don't want Steam, etc. It's a big can of worms.

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

#152

Post by Broken_Hippo »

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…

...but I would be surprised if the total volume of transactions were greater than that of traditional currencies (ie cash).

You cannot compare the two. If you are poor and someone gives you crypto, you still won't have better food or a better apartment until you turn the crypto into cash. It isn't surprising that a less useful, simple form of transaction notation (which is really what money is and always has been) has less transactions than the sort of currency that can almost always buy you food, let you watch a movie, and pay your rent.

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

#153

Post by eru »

csande17 wrote: post #39
hungryforcodes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvida should be able to meet market demand. You just don't like crypto maybe. If Tesla was out of Models 3s you would blame...? Or correctly assess that Tesla should ramp up production.

If con artists convinced speculative investors to spend millions of dollars on Tesla Model 3s, light them on fire, and dump them into the ocean, I would not blame Tesla for the reduced availability of Model 3s.

Tesla still got paid.

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

#154

Post by beojan »

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…

That or they want to remove software limits on performance to mine cryptocurrency faster.

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

#155

Post by eru »

vl wrote: post #144
leereeves wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a supply issue. By design, proof of work requires even more resources as more resources are spent on it. One might say that it expands to consume all available supply. Because of that, no matter how many cards Nvidia makes, crypto miners will want them all, as long as there is money to be made in crypto.

Not true at all. If enough hardware is available, pool only expands until reward covers electricity cost plus small margin. I.e. bitcoin mining electricity-cost bound for the long time now.

Electricity costs plus cost of capital (etc).

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

#156

Post by jrockway »

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…

I never had any problems with the NVidia driver either, and I can't see how it would prevent the system from booting. (I mean, it's not linked with the kernel and not set to load the module until X starts, so you can get to a single user mode console or SSH in if X breaks. Maybe people think X and booting are the same thing?)

The only complaint I had with NVidia was that a long time ago I had one of the first consumer-grade 4k displays, and it exposed itself as 2 1920x2160 displays. That all worked ... "great". X thought the monitor was two displays, and so anything that cares about the calculation of display boundaries (say, full screen video), didn't work correctly; it would just show on half the monitor. One day I found that a config parsing bug could cause the xrandr extension to be disabled while keeping everything else working, and then full screen worked. (The options to just lie to xrandr or disable it were of course broken, which is why bugs interacting with bugs was the fix. They never fixed the bugs or the bugged bugs, so shrug I guess.) It took me months of pulling out my hair to find that workaround, and having used X since before xrandr was invented it drove me crazy. In a past life, I also pulled out all my hair to get xrandr to work. It never fucking worked. And then the one time you don't want it to work, it works and can't be made not to work. Argh!!! Just send me back to 2000 please!

(Since then I've switched to Windows, and I still have that monitor. It works perfectly under Windows. You wouldn't even know that it uses the hacky Displayport MST stuff. Probably have a nice hack hard-coded right into the driver, and if it doesn't activate for some reason, you're completely screwed.)

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

#157

Post by feanaro »

hyperman1 wrote: post #147

I wonder how professional these criminals are. A crime syndicate would silently ask for money. This seems either a false flag operation for a group wanting something else, or much more likely a kid playing around and finding an unlocked door. That last case, a kid pissing of a powerfull entity with a crime, generally does not end well for the kid. I don't see NVidia publicly giving in and loosing face, so there seems…

So you think nVidia will want to see the release of all of its chip schematics? That's an interesting position, but I fail to see how that would be a good idea for them. Perhaps if they are hoping the hackers will be apprehended before Friday.

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

#158

Post by eru »

stingraycharles wrote: post #107
bouncycastle wrote: post #30

I'm not a big fan of limiting hardware to run only approved software. One day it's for limiting crypto mining, the next day it will be for limiting our ability to use strong encryption. It's a slippery slope.

Isn’t this the case in many different products? E.g. I can buy a car which has certain features “locked”, because it’s cheaper for the manufacturing company to have a single production line, and helps ease supply chain / inventory management as well.

Yes. And I think the formulation 'I'm not a big fan of' is exactly right here:

It's a bit annoying, but also a trade-off I'd be willing to make for the right advantages.

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

#159

Post by randomhodler84 »

DangitBobby wrote: post #145
randomhodler84 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry you are being outbid by another guy who wants to mine with a graphics card, but who are you to say that guy securing a censorship resistant and decentralized monetary system is less legit than your leisure time amateur rocket league tournament? If the owner uses it to train a ML model? Is that legit then? Or can general purpose GPUs only be single purpose for games. For gamers?

I think my position is well known. I am not the first person to argue that cryptocurrencies are negative because they generate waste by design and are a technical solution to social/meatspace problems. I personally don't really need a GPU right now (lucky for me I can probably hold off a couple more years), but I am pretty concerned about the future of the planet in general and have some increased existential dread a…

Our views are mutually incompatible, but only one of us is correct. :-) time, the universal currency, will be the final arbiter.

I do hope it works out for humanity tho, maybe we are alone in the universe and we are squandering the most unique and precious outcome of random chance, life.

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

#160

Post by theresistor »

eru wrote: post #149
Blammar wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appearanc…

Isn't that essentially the same as what everyone does with CPUs?

GPUs ship with far more workarounds in the drivers because the programmer only has access to the hardware via drivers that can cover up the bugs, and because they’re not constrained by binary compatibility.
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