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

arstechnica.com

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

#281

Post by andi999 »

lmm wrote: post #216
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…

The binary driver made me a big NVidia fan FWIW. It works, consistently and easily, on both Linux and FreeBSD. The unified release makes both of those feel like a first-class citizen alongside Windows. It's always been more reliable than the ATI/AMD drivers, even when the latter are notionally open-source. (I will say that Intel video drivers have also always been good). Sure, it'd be nice for it to be open-source to…

Which card do you use?

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

#283

Post by 7steps2much »

eru wrote: post #162
baby wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrencies are pretty green besides bitcoin and ethereum

The relevant metric is probably something like electricity spend (or ton of CO2 emitted) per dollar of economic value created. Bitcoin and ethereum burn a lot of electricity, but they are also worth a lot.

However, one could argue that a proof of stake Ethereum (for example) would still be worth as much while at the same time drastically reducing the amount of CO2 emitted. So if we measure it that way then moving away from proof of work should be the way to make everyone happy?

No more crypto miners buying graphics cards, far less CO2 emissions, crypto retains it's value since most owners don't really care about how it is made anyways and only see it as an investment opportunity.

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

#284

Post by danuker »

jonkoops wrote: post #247
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,…

> 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.

Absolutely. On my last NVIDIA device, I ended up using Nouveau (luckily enough my specific card did not have firmware signing - NV110). There were absolutely no crashes, but some games did become unplayable (incomplete features). https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html

Ever since, I have only bought CPU-integrated graphics (an Intel desktop and an AMD laptop for my cousin). Proud to say I have never sponsored the mandatory signed firmware devices.

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

#285

Post by wang_li »

usednet wrote: post #198
chakintosh wrote: post #189

Probably a stupid question, but even if the hackers release everything, wouldn't be illegal for competitors to use that information since NVIDIA most likely has already patented that?

Of course it would be illegal, but how would they prove it? No doubt competitors would take advantage of having the entirety of Nvidia’s architecture.

Employee calls Nvidia and reports it, receives fat reward.

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

#286

Post by dspillett »

ehnto wrote: post #66
DangitBobby wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely support making GPUs less attractive to miners. I'd buy a card that could be remotely disabled when usage patterns matched crypto mining if it meant I could spend MSRP on a modern card.

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…

> Is there some practical way to delineate the two product usages that isn't arbitrary I wonder?

Highly unlikely. There might be reasonably reliable heuristics to identify gaming operations, but any signal for mining is likely to trigger for other long-process number-crunching too.

The idea puts me in mind of the other side: the police once raided a home because surveillance via helicopter identified, from the heat pattern, the property as like to have a loft-based cannabis farm. Turned out that the loft was full of equipment running coin miners. Simple checks get significant false positives.

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

#287

Post by josefx »

pizza234 wrote: post #170
pjerem wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've had a few Nvidia cards (from 9xx to 20xx) and one (very modern) AMD. The AMD drivers runs fine. They're functionally inferior to the Nvidia ones (in several aspects), but I had no big problems. I don't play on Linux, though. I think open source makes a significant the difference - with Nvidia, issues often can't be solved by software devs (e.g. Libreoffice Calc running updating the screen very slowly). I suppose…

> that Linux, on a default configuration (which means, ISO with Nouveau)

To this day I cannot think of a good reason to ship nouveau outside of "lets make users with nvidia cards suffer". I get the idea behind the nouveau project, but pushing an experimental driver that cannot work with 99% of the hardware it latches onto and forces users to disable it if they want a basic working system is actively malicious.

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

#288

Post by mysterydip »

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…

Reminds me of a story where someone joined a company, then immediately fixed a bug in the code that had been bothering them for years, sighed, and put in their two weeks' notice.

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

#289

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #280
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>The GPU can allocate more than that though if the program makes a slightly different allocate call to request it.

Maybe in ROCM, but not in generic Windows and Linux apps and video games that I've tried. They all cap out at whatever you set in BIOS for the iGPU VRAM reservation and don't go beyond that into system RAM. If ROCM has this ability how come AMD's driver, at least in Windows, doesn't do this memory overflow thing for VRAM hungry apps like video games, as that would certainly alleviate this issue.

IMHO, still a worse implementation than the unified model of Intel. Having a large chunk of memory constantly blocked for a HW component, regardless if it's currently needed or not is just horribly inefficient, especially when you're on a mobile device and have 16GB of RAM or less to play with.

Disappointing.

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

#290

Post by fnomnom »

schappim wrote: post #256
DangitBobby wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats wonderful. Im sure a handful of victories can be listed. I highly doubt they wouldn't have found another way to purchase a car, though. Anyway, I need not remind you of how big a boon cryptocurrencies have been to criminals and con artists. I think it should be pretty clear to anyone on this site why someone would be against them, just like it's clear to me why someone would be for them.

> I highly doubt they wouldn't have found another way to purchase a car, though There was no cash. ATMs we’re dry. > boon cryptocurrencies have been to criminals and con artists It is probably overstated. Orders of magnitude more criminal activity would be going through cash and even orgs that are meant to KYC, such as Western Union or even iTunes gift certificates. How many grannies are sending crypto vs providing l…

> There was no cash. ATMs we’re dry.

paypal, venmo, cashapp etc would have worked the same. for all of them and for crypto you need to be in the ecosystem (need wallets, accounts, apps etc) and internet access.

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