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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

#381

Post by forgetfulness »

0xedd wrote: post #34
gambiting wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What long list of reasons? LHR has absolutely zero impact on games. If anything, its presence was helping gamers because miners were at least somewhat put off buying LHR GPUs, making them more available to gamers.

"You don't own your hardware" is a very long list in my book.

They were trying to make their products less attractive to people who were buying out their traditional customers. You aren't even going to own a GPU if they were all hoarded by "crypto" miners.

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

#382

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

Personally, I just switched to AMD and never had to think about GPU drivers again.

Ok, I do have to add the non-free firmware when I install Debian, once every installation. But there are no random problems all the time, no "your card is too old for your computer to keep working", no "your card is too new for your computer", basically nothing more than adding a single package.

I imagine NVidia works really well on Windows, because people keep saying good things about them, and there is absolutely no chance somebody on Linux will ever say something good.

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

#383

Post by icejjfish »

danaris wrote: post #354
oarsinsync wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short term thinking can often appear to be attractive in the short term. It's the long term implications that get you, and by then it's too late.

Allowing/supporting crypto mining is short-term thinking. It's a bunch of wealthy people burning absurd amounts of fossil fuels solely for the purpose of making themselves wealthier. There is no benefit to society from allowing this.

They’re not merely making themselves wealthier - they’re providing a service. How is this different from an airline or any other user of fossil fuel?

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

#384

Post by z3c0 »

bigcheesegs wrote: post #380
z3c0 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it seems very obviously a move to force miners to use more GPUs in parallel This is very obviously wrong. The economics of crypto mining are almost entirely dominated by power cost. Nvidia's decision here simply means they will use other hardware, not more of the LHR hardware. Nvidia already can't make enough GPUs to satisfy demand. Why would they try to increase undesirable demand (which is going away soon anyway,…

If that's the case, then I stand corrected, but it does not change my point that a single company being able to bottleneck a resource is problematic.

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

#385

Post by marcosdumay »

ihateolives wrote: post #269
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…

> No single piece of software has wasted more of my time than Nvidia's drivers I see you haven't used printers much :)

Ironically, printer drivers are pretty ok on Linux.

It's just everywhere else that they are a problem.

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

#386

Post by seizethegdgap »

jason-phillips wrote: post #376
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…

> 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 work, it is disrupting every kind of interaction, even those that had nothing to do with money. Things that were completely econ…

You should read their second paragraph.

Unless you were going for some kind of meta-joke/correction, in which case bravo.

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

#387

Post by rfoo »

narrator wrote: post #361
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).

> That infrastructure is mostly run on NVIDIA chips

Not anymore.

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

#388

Post by vetinari »

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…

Isn't this some distro-specific problem?

VP9 should be available since Mesa 18.1 (or so) for VCN-based GPUs (i.e. Raven Ridge and newer). VP9 is not supported in hardware on UVD-based GPUs (i.e. discrete Vega).

VCN 3.0-based GPUs (i.e. RDNA2, the 6000-series APUs) also support AV1 decoding.

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

#389

Post by fritzo »

dan-0 wrote: post #333
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…

This was the single biggest "driver" to me moving to Mac from Linux. I had a really nice system that I built and used for work. I was working on a project with a 24 hour requirement, it was only an hour of work. I needed to update for a particular dependency, but decided to update everything and low and behold, my video output broke after the update. I made the deadline, but spent literally all day and night trying t…

> but decided to update everything

We each make that mistake once ;)

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

#390

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

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…

It's what happens when you throw a pyramid scheme into something - just like with pyramid/mlm schemes in real life, suddenly everything is about optimizing for the scheme. Every conversation becomes a sales pitch.
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