>"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?
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Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
391–400 of 693 posts
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#392Earlier 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…
This is basically what happened to me, though twenty years ago.
Since then linux has been great for me - on the servers.
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. My software freedom is not dependent on the existence of cryptocurrencies. My hardware freedom is currently significantly hampered by them.
And that is where the contradiction exists — let’s say you get your way, and governments start arresting people doing arbitrary computation on their graphics card — let’s say hashing. That would very bad for everyone’s freedoms, software and hardware. The same anticryptocurrency playbook is what was used against cryptography in the 90s. Technology that challenges the powerful is dangerous! It’s ok to not like cryptoc…
If we just arrest people for selling them for money instead, 99% of the problem would go away overnight. People can trade them as stamps or even barter them if they're so inclined, nobody has to be arrested for performing hash collisions on strings.
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#394> 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 Wi…
Nvidia drivers are decent on Linux - almost all ML people use it and they're incredibly dependent on CUDA. Nvidia has a vested interest in this because they pivoted hard towards deep learning, but they're also comfortable because there's no good competition from AMD or ARM yet. TPUs are excellent but still niche, despite Google's best efforts to push them. Driver installation on Linux is mostly good I've found, just using native package managers and Conda for dev environments. Gaming also works fine and of course so does mining...
But there are odd annoyances - you get less control over device parameters in Linux. Things like setting the memory clock or undervolting (not just power factor) only seem to work in Windows.
This leak is a pain. If Nvidia refuses and they just leak the code, we're still dependent on Nvidia to approve an open source driver. It's like when hackers try and take code to other companies - AMD wouldn't touch any of this with a barge pole for fear of infringement. You're not going to get magical driver support in Debian from leaked code. Best case someone releases an illegal driver and it doesn't get immediately taken down.
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The resources are bottlenecked due to the chip shortage, which happened because the entire automotive industry mis-forecast demand for the pandemic. All the GPU manufacturers have the same problem: they don't want to build GPU production lines for a market that is going away. The problem isn't Nvidia, it's proof of work, which will bottleneck as many resources as it can by design.
This is what happens when you try and build a planetary messaging system with inefficiency as a design goal.
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#396> 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…
That or they want to remove software limits on performance to mine cryptocurrency faster.
There should be no software limits in the first place.
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or tried to install tensorflow ayoo
Eh it’s not too bad on Linux as long as you use the official docker image that has cuda, cudnn, and tensorflow with matching versions. This also lets you use tf1, tf2, and PyTorch in separate containers without upgrading cudnn in lockstep. Larger projects that use several models inevitably require all three. If you install it yourself, you’re in for a world of hurt.
NixOS has this decently solved. “Some assembly required”, but at least you can switch between versions without messing up your system.
So long as the driver doesn’t change, you can even run multiple versions simultaneously and nothing will break.
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I’m trying to be part of the solution by buying AND graphics card for my Linux box.
Vote with your wallet, very nice!
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh it’s not too bad on Linux as long as you use the official docker image that has cuda, cudnn, and tensorflow with matching versions. This also lets you use tf1, tf2, and PyTorch in separate containers without upgrading cudnn in lockstep. Larger projects that use several models inevitably require all three. If you install it yourself, you’re in for a world of hurt.
NixOS has this decently solved. “Some assembly required”, but at least you can switch between versions without messing up your system. So long as the driver doesn’t change, you can even run multiple versions simultaneously and nothing will break.
Imagine having to install a different OS to run something, what year is this?
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#400A 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?
Although I agree that post crypto incentives have changed. It's a bit much to say that it's "completely changed the digital universe" this group is targeting the primary developer of GPU mining.
In terms of the ask, I think they are being much cleverer than dumb money as unlocking the GPU mining further could create new areas of economic power, i.e ebay old gpus or push NVIDIA to design a specific crypto gpu?
Either way capitalism is what's driving the team.