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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

#241

Post by jimmydorry »

ckastner wrote: post #94
httpz wrote: post #9

>"We decided to help mining and gaming community," I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. Wouldn't this drive up the crypto-motivated demand for GPUs even more and hurt the gaming community?

> I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. Agreed. But I don't understand how this helps the mining community, either. Removing the LHR restriction would lead to a vast increase of the network hash rate, and consequently the difficulty would also increase, leading to lower rewards. The result would be that (1) non-LHR card owner's rewards go down significantly, and (2) LHR card owner's rewards p…

At an individual level though, increasing the hash rate of your setup without impacting energy usage means more efficient mining (cheaper to run and faster to recoup investment). Long-term, the least efficienct miners get forced out until there is no profit to be had for the effort involved.

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

#242

Post by EdwardDiego »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #54
DangitBobby wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3. To actually help gamers and other legitimate users of GPUs

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?

> decentralized monetary system

Binance. Mt Gox. QuadrigaCX. Crytopia. Poly Network.

Yeah, decentralised.

Also, censorship resistant? Tell that to people having their accounts on the "decentralised" money system being banned for using crypto that's gone through a mixer.

The public blockchain makes censoring a given user even easier, because your transaction log is public knowledge.

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

#243

Post by jimmydorry »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #16
hungryforcodes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just sell more GPUs. Nvidia makes more money. We get more and better GPUs. I'm not sure how this is bad.

So I take it you haven't tried to buy a 30-series GPU for gaming, then. It's impossible*, and that's because of mining*. * Yeah, yeah, I know, supply chain this and pandemic demand that, but it's really mining that's the culprit.

I bought one the other day, no hassle from a local store. They had a pretty wide select of 30-series GPUs. The cost of electricity is high in Australia though, so it is certainly less economical to mine here.

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

#244

Post by napolux »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #178

> We decided to help mining and gaming community," Lapsus$ members wrote Oh please. You have crypto and a vested interest in making GPU’s viable again. Sorry but I have zero sympathy-crypto miners exacerbated the silicon shortage and leveraged their increased capital to make consumer cards so inordinately difficult to get. So no, suffer.

This. Tried to get back to PC gaming for a while. I play on PS5 and XSX but damn, with the price of a performant GPU I can buy 3/4 PS5s or 1 PS5 and a lot of games for it.

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

#245

Post by rocqua »

heavyset_go wrote: post #64
httpz wrote: post #9

>"We decided to help mining and gaming community," I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. Wouldn't this drive up the crypto-motivated demand for GPUs even more and hurt the gaming community?

> I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. It doesn't. This is just miners co-opting an old argument to gain sympathy.

It hurts the resale value of those cards for gamers. Hence in the long run, it will also keep gamers from upgrading that card as easily, because they will get less for their existing card.

It's a flimsy argument, but it's the only one I know so I figure that is what they meant.

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

#246

Post by pbasista »

Blammar wrote: post #140
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 appearanc…

I do not understand your argument.

You suggest that there are work-arounds in the drivers. And then you imply that people do not want to see them.

First of all, I am unsure if people not willing to see the work-arounds is generally true to begin with.

But more importantly, if someone does not want to see something, they can simply not look. I do not understand how that is meant to justify these drivers being binary blobs.

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

#247

Post by jonkoops »

mrtksn wrote: post #73
modeless wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No single piece of software has wasted more of my time than Nvidia's drivers, mostly (though not exclusively) on Linux. They've rendered my OS unbootable so many times over the years. So many times I've spent whole days of my life troubleshooting, upgrading, downgrading, configuring, rebooting. Then often reinstalling the OS after their installers mess stuff up in ways that are impossible to even know until they pop…

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,…

> It's sad to hear that graphics drivers are still not a solved problem on Linux.

They are, Intel and AMD have shown that it can be done and it can be done excellently. NVIDIA just decided they do not want to be part of the solution.

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

#248

Post by rocqua »

sva_ wrote: post #235
mjg59 wrote: post #208

There are two scenarios where carrying out their threat plausibly helps the open source community: 1) A source drop demonstrates that Nvidia incorporated GPLed code into their drivers. This is, honestly, unlikely - Nvidia has sufficiently competent lawyers to ensure that everyone they employ is extremely aware of what the consequences of that would be 2) The source drop includes the private keys used to sign Nvidia G…

> I'm not aware of any case law around whether private keys are copyrightable That's often up to debate, apparently. I think most recently, Widevine private keys regularly get DMCA'd.

Distributing the keys is illegal, but what about using they keys and distributing the resulting signed firmware?

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

#249

Post by mapcars »

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.

I can tell you Russia is so far behind in technology they won't be able to do anything with this knowledge.

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

#250

Post by 10x-dev »

feanaro wrote: post #157
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.

What's to stop the group from releasing them anyway? What happens to the files on the hacker's drive - surely the hackers won't delete the files? That would give up the leverage they have. If the files are out there, they could even be leaked by accident (hacker loses laptop, drama in hacker group causes member to rebel, rival group hacks this group, etc)

Risk-wise, I think nVidia has no choice here. They should assume the Verilog source will eventually be made available. The only question is whether the time between now and then is valuable enough to give in to the demands.

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