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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

#441

Post by eganist »

charcircuit wrote: post #218
eganist wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're mining, buy ASICs that do the job. That way the capacity is available for people who want to game casually, game professionally, render, or compute.

Requiring an ASIC to mine centralizes mining. Everyone should be able to contribute to the consensus process which is why GPU mining exists. There is a large number of people who already have comupters with graphics cards in them.

> Requiring an ASIC to mine centralizes mining.

As compared to graphics cards where people are largely buying cards and dedicating them to the task, how does the use of ASICs centralize mining?

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

#442

Post by danaris »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #415
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.

> 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…

> 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.

I see it as exactly the opposite.

We live in a society, and as a society, we have agreed upon certain rules about how money is handled. If you want to opt out of those rules, then get out of our society.

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

#443

Post by ta988 »

rekoil wrote: post #430
pavlov wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> crypto is a cancer. Proof of Work is a cancer. The two are heavily intertwined, but they are not technically mutual terms. Proof of Work needs to be stopped, irrelevant of what it is used for.

We had the promise that this would change many years ago, I doubt it will change for many years to come.

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

#444

Post by ehnto »

dspillett wrote: post #286
ehnto wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some practical way to delineate the two product usages that isn't arbitrary I wonder? Maybe make mining only cards more performant and affordable than consumer graphics cards, so that consumer cards will drop in price from less demand? I find it hard to believe that a use case specific device wouldn't be able to dethrone graphics cards as the better choice for miners at the right price, and it should be chea…

> Is there some practical way to delineate the two product usages that isn't arbitrary I wonder? Highly unlikely. There might be reasonably reliable heuristics to identify gaming operations, but any signal for mining is likely to trigger for other long-process number-crunching too. The idea puts me in mind of the other side: the police once raided a home because surveillance via helicopter identified, from the heat p…

Oh I meant specifically avoiding those kinds of arbitrary locks and checks, by delineate I meant make two separate product lines to cater for the two different markets. My hope would be that miners would buy the one better for mining, taking some pressure off the graphics cards for graphics market. Imagine a "3080 Mining" card that has no monitor outputs, no huge memory reserves, no extra-curricular processing units. It should be much cheaper.

But perhaps miners would just buy both mining and non-mining cards, since it's not a zero sum purchase, every card added to the stack is worthwhile.

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

#445

Post by [deleted] »

pavlov wrote: post #405
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#446

Post by vetinari »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #422
vetinari wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>VP9 should be available since Mesa 18.1 (or so) for VCN-based GPUs (i.e. Raven Ridge and newer). Yeah, in theory it's available, but good luck actually getting your browser to use it to HW decode YouTube videos under linux out of the box. It usually works fine with video players like mplayer but not in browsers. There are endless threads online about this not working. I for one, never managed to get it to work in an…

> It usually works fine with video players like mplayer but not in browsers.

Chrome doesn't support VA-API, so do not bother trying.

Some distributions do have Chromium builds with VA-API support enabled, but YMMV. Chromium uses X11 only and libva requires dri2, so it doesn't work under XWayland, which supports only dri3. (=> Chromium with VA-API works only in native X11 session)

Firefox does support VA-API. There was a period of time, when it did only under Wayland, but nowadays both X11 and Wayland should work. When running under Wayland, use the native version and /not/ via XWayland, because the same thing as with Chromium applies.

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

#447

Post by buran77 »

rekoil wrote: post #430
pavlov wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> crypto is a cancer. Proof of Work is a cancer. The two are heavily intertwined, but they are not technically mutual terms. Proof of Work needs to be stopped, irrelevant of what it is used for.

PoW(hatever) is a cancer as long as the "Whatever" doesn't have any value behind it, it doesn't bring value to society because it's guaranteed to take resources without leaving anything useful behind. It incentivizes people to abuse anything at hand to obtain proof of that otherwise worthless "Whatever". Whether it's "work" or "space" or "time" then someone will always look to abuse others to obtain more proof without it creating any value.

Unlike money (generically) PoWhatever cryptocurrencies aren't backed by anything anyone can define as valuable. Proof of Housing_built, Proof of Goods_transported, Proof of Music_created, Proof of Space_flights all create real value. Proof of Work where the work is without doubt useless in itself and an absolute net loss for society can't result in anything practically valuable. At best it results in a very wasteful Ponzi scheme.

Imagine something as innocent as "proof of clapping hands", you may get some reward for holding a record but it's otherwise completely useless. That at least only affects you and your hands, even if a waste of time that doesn't seem to bring anything of value - joy or other practical benefits. What if someone could abuse you and force you to clap at the cost of lost productivity at work, health issues, etc. and the result of that work is... nothing?

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

#448

Post by Zpalmtree »

leereeves wrote: post #138
randomhodler84 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but also the dissident, someone fleeing a war zone, someone having their life savings destroyed by bankers and politicians… It’s ok if you don’t have a use for decentralized money. I hope you never need it, and continue a sheltered life of luxury and convenience.

Someone fleeing a war zone probably shouldn't depend on currencies that require Internet access. For defending one's life savings, I'd recommend investing in productive enterprises rather than speculative and volatile get rich quick schemes, but to each their own. For dissidents, crypto might be some small help, but not much. (For example, crypto did help WikiLeaks accept donations, but Julian Assange is still in pri…

I'm sure this info is very helpful to the people who invested their funds in the Russian stock market - are they not productive enterprises? Now completely useless as money.

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

#449

Post by miloignis »

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…

This is similarly perhaps my single biggest reason for using the NixOS disto instead of Arch. If one big update breaks everything, rolling back is as simple as choosing the older state from the boot menu and voila. It's helped me sleep so much better with updates both on my personal computers and my server, to know I'm not going to bring it down for more than a minute or two even with a failed update.

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

#450

Post by Cicero22 »

beojan wrote: post #154
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…

That or they want to remove software limits on performance to mine cryptocurrency faster.

Wouldn't that just end up increasing the difficulty of mining in the long term since it would all be opensource? I feel like any advantage they get by patching the software would be short lived with many people following suit, but I could 100% be wrong about that.
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