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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

#411

Post by verisimi »

I don't approve of blackmail, etc.

But, it seems a pretty reasonable request! If you buy a graphics card (or anything) artificially constraining it via software seems wrong.

It reminds me of how phones are updated to run more slowly once newer versions are available. It also reminds me of how white goods (washing machines, fridges) have small plastic components

Anyway, this is some sort of modern version of 'planned obsolescence'.

How any artificial obsolescence is legal or moral, when we are also worried about wasting resources, I don't know!

Well, I do know - its cos companies want to make as much money as possible, while letting the public carry the weight of their mistakes.

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

#412

Post by Kon-Peki »

danuker wrote: post #284
jonkoops wrote: post #247

Earlier 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.

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 sponso…

My son wanted a "gaming PC" and I gave in with the only stipulation being that it had to be Linux. He plays Minecraft and Cities: Skylines, so it's all good. The Nouveau drivers suck for this. It's a ~3-year old i7 PC with a 1660 GPU. Maybe that's the difference? Switching from Nouveau to the Ubuntu-provided recommended Nvidia driver (510.XX?) gives you a 200-300% improvement!

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

#413

Post by zucker42 »

deathcakes wrote: post #340
ActorNightly wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better solution would be for AMD to invest in bringing their ML stacks up to date to work with PyTorch and such.

They actually have already - PyTorch works straight up with ROCm, and so does Tensorflow. There is a little faffing to do to get it to work but they've made great progress in the last six months.

Except consumer GPUs don't officially support ROCm, despite consistent pressure from users for years. And there's no indication of when that situation will change.

CUDA is successful because the same software works on low-powered laptop GPUs and expensive datacenter GPUs.

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

#414

Post by seanw444 »

seizethegdgap wrote: post #386
jason-phillips wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It was definitely a serious-toned joke. Bravo from me as well. I don't know how people navigate the web without an ad blocker anymore. Do people actually do that? it's unbearable. Slows pages down, clutters the actual content, wastes more battery on phones and laptops, generally rewards companies for spying on you... it's awful.

Can we go back to when people weren't so lazy as to do everything in their power to not have to give their cash directly to someone? Sure, you don't have to hand your money to a content maker on YouTube anymore, for example, but I wonder how much the lifespan of your device is decreased by the added processing that comes from advertising, and how much that adds up in the end. You may as well just have paid them money directly in the first place.

Apply that thought to any "free-but-only-because-it's-ad-ridden" software/service.

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

#415

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

> There is no benefit to society from allowing this.

Sure there is. We get a financial system that's independent of banks and governments. I don't care how much energy it consumes, that's a worthy goal.

Also, it's not even 1% of global energy consumption and even that calculation is based on rather questionable assumptions like "energy usage is proportional to bitcoin price". If you want to stop the burning of fossil fuels, what you need to do is advocate against trade with not only China but also all western countries whose luxurious lifestyles are literally dependent on such wasteful use of resources. Gotta level heavy economic sanctions against all the highly polluting developed nations until they put a stop to it.

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

#416

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

heavyset_go wrote: post #64
httpz wrote: post #9

>"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?

> I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. It doesn't. This is just miners co-opting an old argument to gain sympathy.

It doesn’t even help miners really because the difficulty will just adjust. I don’t think these guys even understand the basics of what they do.

The only way I could see it helping is if they have all Nvidia cards and other people have some AMD lol.

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

#417

Post by matthewaveryusa »

tyjen wrote: post #409
jason-phillips wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Frankly I would pick that over ads any day.

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

#418

Post by Invictus0 »

tyjen wrote: post #409
jason-phillips wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Welcome to the future. The year is 2018.

https://cyware.com/news/pirate-bay-found-running-browser-bas...

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

#419

Post by jrochkind1 »

I doubt nvidia would have complied with their demands anyway, but the new demand "make all your code open source or else we'll release it ourselves" gives them absolutely no incentive to comply at all. If the choices are you can have your source out there but unlicensed so it's illegal for anyone else to use it, or you can choose to legally let anyone else use your source -- why would nvidia ever choose the latter?

The original version of the demand at least gave nvidia some business incentive to comply. I don't think they've thought through their demands very well.

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

#420

Post by salawat »

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.

No, it isn't, and the malice comes entirely from circumstances foisted on the Free/Libre Open Source community by Nvidia's inherent user hostility at the behest of corporate America/the music/content delivery industry.

It isn't that hard to write a manual. It isn't that hard to respect user freedom to use tge device they purchased. It isn't that hard to just leave well enough alone.

But no.... Nvidia just couldn't.

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