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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

#361

Post by narrator »

ksec wrote: post #332

Hypothetically speaking, they could release everything and it still wouldn't damage Nvidia much other than PR and marketing. The drivers code cant be used in open source, as it will be IP theft. Their competitors could see how they are doing things, but it isn't copy and paste, those techniques would still requires years of understanding and implementation on their own hardware. Assuming they are applicable. Even if…

Their Chinese competition would love it. They have a huge need for GPUs in China to run their surveillance infrastructure. That infrastructure is mostly run on NVIDIA chips. I am sure the CCP wouldn't care about the IP issues. They have fabs that could produce good enough chips (12nm), though not as good as TSMC (5nm).

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

#362

Post by codedokode »

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.

Is it so? I looked up those GPUs at Russian online stores, and they are available for order, although the prices start from $1230 for RTX 3060.

If you think properly, it doesn't make sense to pay such a price just to kill some time playing games. A cheaper card would fit this purpose better.

Also I cannot blame the miners. If I am not missing something, currently a GPU mines cryptocurrency worth 50% of it cost per year (in countries with cheap electricity). I doubt you can get such percent in a bank deposit or other kind of investment.

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

#363

Post by funstuff007 »

modeless wrote: post #18
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…

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…

seriously, nothing makes me feel more inept that wrestling with a new GPU.

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

#364

Post by brightball »

z3c0 wrote: post #348
SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #335

A bit off-topic, but the fact that criminals asked for help mining, instead of money or crypto-money, just gave me an epiphany: The whole internet is showing the first signs of a digital Resource Curse [1] brought by crypto mining. Crypto mining changed the economics of the digital world in such a drastic way that it is poisoning all kinds of internet interactions. It is not just about disrupting how money used to wo…

I agree with you overall - this does appear to be another resource curse - but I want to point out that the culprits in this matter are the companies that bottleneck the overly-abundant resources for profit (so Nvidia and Google), not the users who attempt to bleed constrained value through that bottleneck. Nvidia used their near-monopolistic power over the graphics card market in an attempt to globally limit the has…

I’m not sure Google can be blamed for the bottleneck since user behavior says that people will only look through so many search results before moving on. That’s not abundance since no matter how many results Google shows the people problem will remain.

Advertisers and marketers fighting for top positions are where the real curse comes from IMO.

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

#365

Post by ftyers »

NVIDIA's terrible software (drivers and CUDA) have wasted months of my time. They have what is essentially a monopoly on hardware for "Deep learning" and so this should come as no surprise. Of course to a certain extent this isn't their fault, if AMD or Intel got their acts together they could come up with a much better solution, and if it were free/open-source software people would even pay a premium to be free of NVIDIA's cruel grasp.

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

#366

Post by brightball »

danaris wrote: post #359
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure many people would agree with your diagnosis. What's the treatment, though?

Ban crypto mining. Outlaw exchanging cryptocurrencies (directly) to USD (and other fiat currencies, but USD is the big one for now).

It seems like it’s happening indirectly. I keep hearing stories about places like Coinbase not converting dirty Bitcoin that’s been associated with illegal activity.

Eventually, it seems like this will apply to all of it.

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

#367

Post by throwaway5371 »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #344
SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #335

A bit off-topic, but the fact that criminals asked for help mining, instead of money or crypto-money, just gave me an epiphany: The whole internet is showing the first signs of a digital Resource Curse [1] brought by crypto mining. Crypto mining changed the economics of the digital world in such a drastic way that it is poisoning all kinds of internet interactions. It is not just about disrupting how money used to wo…

I'm sure many people would agree with your diagnosis. What's the treatment, though?

artificial limits, on bandwidth and energy could be one way to both foster innovation and decrease resource usage

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

#368

Post by dtech »

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…

w.r.t. 2 this has been a thing with blu-ray and PS3 encryption key leaks [1]. I don't know if courts ever ruled on it

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_homebrew

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

#369

Post by thn-gap »

breakfastduck wrote: post #273
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do care when this use case is harmful.

We shouldn't need to limit hardware for specific usages, but we already see that people won't stop themselves from wasting energy and accelerating world climate if this gives you more wealth and power.

I'd also be up for limiting all military weapons from being so destructive across the globe for example. It's mind blowing how we managed to create so many harmful tools in such a small time span of our history.

But I agree with you when the use case is actually useful for humanity.

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

#370

Post by DethNinja »

larsrc wrote: post #141
smokey_circles wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to engage with this opinion because I genuinely have no idea how this is the conclusion people reach (that crypto is bad for the environment). The configuration of transistors through which electrons are punched is obviously not the problem (at least I hope it's obvious). So it must be about proof of work chains, right? That they create high demand? That's about the only point I do understand, but I think yo…

Cryptocurrencies have shown that you can transform energy into money without any of that messy middle step of doing something useful.

How is that different than central bank printing? Print money and hand it to your buddies so that they buy new yachts instead of producing anything of value?

At least with crypto we know where the money is going and potentially how it is spent.

I can’t believe people still argue against cryptocurrencies in 2022 when it has completely proved itself superior to fiat in every way possible, including overall energy usage.

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