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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

#401

Post by whywhywhywhy »

DangitBobby wrote: post #124
schappim wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

If war broke out in my country I’d be glad I could take my money across the border by memorizing some words rather than dragging silver or possibly now worthless currency.

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

#402

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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…

Both of your examples (cryptocurrency and paid linking) are indeed plagues on quality content, but I disagree that they’ve replaced quality content.

They’re mostly examples of new business models that people have tried to use to generate new types of content and monetization in a crowded space. Sites like HN and commenters here aren’t trading links for money, we’re just sharing interesting content. The obvious paid advertisements (going from 0 votes to +20 votes in minutes despite obvious content marketing) get flagged away quickly for the most part.

Crypto and “web3” especially has become a catch-all for people who want to catch a gold rush or have otherwise run out of ideas for traditional business success. The problem they’re discovering is that the average consumer has almost no interest in crypto unless it’s as a speculative investment to flip to someone else, which means the entire space is basically crypto people flipping things to each other and trying to convince new people to join in so they have more downstream people to flip their tokens too.

But despite the constant efforts to flood our news feeds with crypto stories, most of us navigate the internet without cryptocurrencies or NFTs because they’re entirely unnecessary and you have to go out of your way to do anything with them. Since they bring no actual benefit, we just ignore it. And it’s fine.

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

#403

Post by kinnth »

searchableguy wrote: post #378
anthony_r wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen what happened in the finance world with respect to Russia recently? Feels to me like it is perfectly possible with the right Zeitgeist. Pretty much all the on/off ramps for Russian money are gone at the moment.

Which I acknowledge above. You can ban exchange to fiat but it will only reduce value, not completely eliminate it as there are protocols which derive value from defi ecosystem itself. I.e people will start directly using these currency for payments (which they already do) without exchanging to fiat. The stability is maintained by the defi collateral and shared acceptance. So you would have to ban everyone to accept…

So let's assume crypto is banned? Why is FIAT much better? What about another 2008? What about Quantitative Easing?

It's not solving much.

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

#404

Post by kinnth »

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…

Do you now love or loathe your mac and it's cost?

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

#405

Post by pavlov »

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…

Ads at least require an audience. Crypto mining abuse requires just the ability to execute anything.

That’s why ads are like acne for the Internet, but crypto is a cancer.

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

#408

Post by gryn »

josefx wrote: post #287
pizza234 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know the last time you used nouveau drivers but this is just wrong.

is it feature complete ? no, but to go ahead and say it's not working for 99% is just lying here is the list: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html

what you can say though is that it is a bad idea for GPU that are relatively recent. wont block you from booting or displaying to screen but would probably be slow.

also this is distro dependent, I remember being given the choice with no default one (mean chosen automatically) when installing Manjaro (a derivative of arch linux).

I chose the proprietary driver since they are feature complete but later switched to nouveau driver since they are not prone to breaking on every other update. that was 2 years ago, zero problems since.

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

#409

Post by tyjen »

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…

This comment chain made me envision a potentially terrible future direction.

Imagine a future where websites force people to consent to allowing them use your device to mine cryptocurrency while you use its services or browse its content instead of ads.

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

#410

Post by sbarre »

post_break wrote: post #377
Aunche wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of examples of hardware being artificially constrained, and low hash rate GPUs are hardly the first. Slippery slope fallacy aside, why would you need a top of the line GPU to do strong encryption? That's something you can do with a pen and paper if you're motivated enough.

I just hacked my 3ds because nintendo is closing the eshop permanently. It uses GPUs to exploit something in the OS based off of known keys. The power needed to crack the code in 1-5 minutes requires powerful GPUs. Are you suggesting if NVIDIA decided to block something like this, I do it with pen and paper?

Yeah any artificial limitation on strong encryption would be on the decrypt side, not the encrypt side.
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