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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

#431

Post by cornegidouille »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #419

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? T…

That's a good point, although they are threatening to release slightly more than just the drivers ("the complete silicon, graphics, and computer chipset files"). But the legal vs. illegal access is definitely interesting and probably not something they took into account. I don't see, say, AMD stealing from "publicly stolen" technology, I can't imagine the insane lawsuit that would ensue. Maybe some Chinese company might do it...

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

#432

Post by lmkg »

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…

That's a good way to summarize the problems that traditional game-devs foresee with NFT games. Game purchases are viewed as speculative investments rather than entertainment.

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

#433

Post by thehappypm »

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.

Can you mine crypto in the browser? I know there are some native hooks, presumably JavaScript is never going to give a good hash rate, but it would be interesting if sites starting dropping JS tags that silently mined crypto in the background.

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

#434

Post by kmeisthax »

thehappypm wrote: post #433
tyjen wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you mine crypto in the browser? I know there are some native hooks, presumably JavaScript is never going to give a good hash rate, but it would be interesting if sites starting dropping JS tags that silently mined crypto in the background.

WASM Monero miners were a big problem years ago.

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

#435

Post by hutzlibu »

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.

"Imagine a future where websites force people to consent "

I imagine a future, where people just do not vist sites, where they do not agree to the conditions.

But like others pointed out, those sites exist already since quite a while.

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

#436

Post by korse »

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.

Isn't that the Brave browser?

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

#437

Post by bart_spoon »

oarsinsync wrote: post #296
Mindwipe wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see why it's attractive when the alternative is no card at all.

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.

At what point does short term become long term? Crypto mining has been an issue for people looking to obtain GPUs going back to at least 2016, which is when I built my first PC, and its only gotten worse and worse as time has gone on.

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

#438

Post by Zpalmtree »

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.

No? I can buy a 3080 and get it under a week from multiple vendors. Sure, it's expensive. It's not impossible though.

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

#439

Post by bart_spoon »

icejjfish wrote: post #383
danaris wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because the service as it stands is of dubious (or negative) worth. So far its main uses are enabling illegal activity and MLM-style get rich quick schemes. For all of the hubbub about the crypto-revolution, we are over a decade in and 99% of its use falls into those two categories.

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

#440

Post by lifthrasiir »

ggreg84 wrote: post #224
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…

From the Nouveau devs themselves: https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961 They claim that leaking anything would actually make their work significantly harder.

Using leaked source code to Nouveau is illegal whatsoever, and the mere existence of the leak means that devs have to more thoroughly audit incoming contributions. The similar thing happened for ReactOS in 2006; they had to audit all the existing source code for more than a year.
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