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

271–280 of 693 posts

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

#271

Post by 7steps2much »

rocqua wrote: post #248
sva_ wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

IANAL but I could imagine that this leads to different problems in some jurisdictions.

Depending on how you look at it using another's entity's cryptographic key to sign something that then "pretends" to have been produced by that entity might classify as forgery.

Though this is just my personal thoughts, not sure if that would hold up in practice. Technically you own the hardware, so "forging" the signature yourself for your hardware probably wouldn't be an issue, but distributing it might be.

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

#272

Post by [deleted] »

ggreg84 wrote: post #225
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.

> 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. I'd assume that developing extra features costs money. If a buyer doesn't need a feature, why should they have to pay for it? For example, if a gamer does not need drivers for a CAD program, or crypto features…

[deleted]

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

#273

Post by breakfastduck »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #255
breakfastduck wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, it's hardly an outrageous view to want to remove artificial performance bottlenecks on a piece of hardware you've spent a considerable amount of money on.

Except there is nothing "fair" about this. In all fairness these crypto-bros could buy the cards specifically made for mining, but they won't because they don't have any resale value. Only reason they are buying GPUs is that they can run it until something better comes to market and still sell it to some gamer who is actually going to use the hardware for its intended purpose. More power to Nvidia. If I could make th…

I don't care what the use case is. I don't support artificial performance limitation on expensive hardware. It's as simple as that.

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

#274

Post by hypertele-Xii »

schappim wrote: post #67
DangitBobby wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be much easier if crypto could just die out.

Why? I saw a good use for this week when journalists used it to purchase a car in war torn Ukraine.

Was that single car worth the energy waste equivalent of a small country?

Detonating a nuclear bomb to kill one person isn't exactly a praise for its effectiveness, either.

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

#275

Post by 7steps2much »

ggreg84 wrote: post #225
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.

> 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. I'd assume that developing extra features costs money. If a buyer doesn't need a feature, why should they have to pay for it? For example, if a gamer does not need drivers for a CAD program, or crypto features…

There is a difference between hardware that simply doesn't support a use case and hardware that technically supports stuff but was artificially locked to no longer do so.

If the hardware was actually different then of course your argument would make sense, you could build cards that can only be used for a certain use case and sell those, but in that case you wouldn't have to lock down the card anyways

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

#276

Post by Aeolun »

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…

So you are saying Nvidia hardware is crap, and therefore we don’t want to see their drivers?

Either that means that AMD hardware is far superior, or people do actually want to see the drivers (including workarounds).

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

#277

Post by danuker »

sva_ wrote: post #266
rocqua wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good point, but also good luck explaining that to a judge.

The judicial system started to realize the finer details in software. For example, in Google v Oracle, verbatim copying of source code was still found a violation of copyright, but using APIs was not (it was deemed fair use).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...

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

#278

Post by trinovantes »

ciupicri wrote: post #238
modeless wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia as a hardware manufacturer has long lead times and low flexibility. As a result they prefer predictable and dependable sales, not random boom and bust cycles. The gaming market is dependable, mining isn't. They don't mind selling some GPUs to miners, of course. But mining is disrupting the supply of GPUs to the gaming market which could hurt future growth of the gaming market in general as well as Nvidia's sha…

Why is the mining market not dependable?

It crashed back in 2018 and dumped a lot of cheap GPUs on the aftermarket. Nvidia plans production runs years in advance and can't handle the randomness of sudden crypto crashes

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

#279

Post by nisegami »

schappim wrote: post #67
DangitBobby wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be much easier if crypto could just die out.

Why? I saw a good use for this week when journalists used it to purchase a car in war torn Ukraine.

Got a link to that? Cryptocurrencies seem to me to be a poor choice in a situation where there might be issues with infrastructure like the electrical grid or internet connectivity.

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

#280

Post by JonChesterfield »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #201
modeless wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hea…

>I've heard AMD's drivers are OK these days but haven't tried them myself because I care about ML. They are OK but with some caveats like VP9 HW decode not being available in Linux AMD iGPU drivers for reasons, which won't be a problem if you're running an AMD desktop tower PC, but if you're gonna watch Youtube on your AMD laptop, your battery will take a hit along with possible extra fan noise, which is unacceptable…

Minor point. That bios setting does dedicate some amount of ram to the GPU, so the rest of the system can't use it. The GPU can allocate more than that though if the program makes a slightly different allocate call to request it.

Seamlessly sharing memory between the two chips works fine with the compute toolchain (rocm), I don't know how transparent it is for games.

Post reply on HN