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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

#471

Post by vmception »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #178

> We decided to help mining and gaming community," Lapsus$ members wrote Oh please. You have crypto and a vested interest in making GPU’s viable again. Sorry but I have zero sympathy-crypto miners exacerbated the silicon shortage and leveraged their increased capital to make consumer cards so inordinately difficult to get. So no, suffer.

Much more likely they don’t have crypto and want to earn it with the excess gpus they have

A balance of crypto is unrelated to the mining market, but i understand that was an impassioned response where all things crypto are in the bad bucket in your mind

I’m writing more so for anybody passing by that doesnt understand how they’re separate

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

#472

Post by NavinF »

hanselot wrote: post #373
NavinF wrote: post #307

Earlier 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.

I don't understand how anyone can be okay with: "Here, run this piece of code. No don't bother trying to read, build or understand it yourself, we know you won't be able to do it, so we put it in a little mystery box over here that you can run on top of your existing operating system. Now please don't ask any questions and go away."

Vouched, but you should know that literally all the comments on your account are [dead].

I can read and understand tf just fine and I’ve had to work around bugs (like the broken image resampling) by doing just that.

Treating tf as a blank box has nothing to do with it. The problem is that nothing none of the ABIs involved here (tf, cudnn, distro libc, nvidia driver, etc) are stable. The best you can hope for is to use the same driver for several containers with matched (tf, libc, cudnn) and that’s worked out well for me in the last couple of years.

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

#473

Post by nightski »

buran77 wrote: post #447
rekoil wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 withou…

But at the end of the day, you can only imagine proof of clapping hands because yes that example is useless.

But proof of work is not useless, hence we don't have to imagine it. Distributed consensus is useful to many people at this point.

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

#474

Post by izacus »

nojs wrote: post #8

> Nvidia introduced LHR in February 2021 with the launch of its GeForce RTX 3060 models. Three months later, the company brought LHR to its GeForce RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti graphics cards. The reason: to make the cards less desirable to people mining Ethereum and possibly other types of cryptocurrencies. What a bizarre move. Why would they do this?

nVidias moat is not just their hardware, but also software - e.g. CUDA (you need a nVidia card), RTX and DLSS (these are big flagship features of 3xxx series and need special software support).

If people using the nVidia software libraries - ML edu organization, gamers and game developrs - can't get their hands on their software, they won't use nVidias proprietary libraries and ignore their market differentiation features. This makes nVidia's moat against competition worse in the longer term while serving finnicky cryptobros in the short term.

nVidia doesn't want that.

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

#475

Post by grogenaut »

Cybercriminals will release demands or rationale like this in an attempt to sway public favor as well as have the company spend resources on the demand/threat instead of remediation or forensics. They're still criminals threatening and extorting others at the end of the day.

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

#476

Post by ganzuul »

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.

There is one non-profit token based on BOINC that uses scientific computation as PoW. Their self-awareness with regards to their influence is impressive.

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

#477

Post by lukeschlather »

z3c0 wrote: post #461
lukeschlather wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

You're likely not going to like this, but you agreeing with their reasoning for bottle-necking a resource does not make it any less problematic that they have the power to do so.

You imagine that you had a vendor selling bread, and you have people who need to eat, and a customer comes and asks for a year's supply of bread so they can have a bread bonfire as a sacrifice to their god so their god can take over the world, you're going to do everything in your power to avoid selling bread to those people. Because they are going to have their bonfire, their god will not appear, and meanwhile everyone will starve.

Nvidia doesn't unilaterally have this power - they are making the same rational choice as all the other GPU vendors, they are just doing it somewhat more forcefully.

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

#478

Post by ganzuul »

bluely wrote: post #455
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.

Interesting tidbit: a few years back I encountered a Minecraft server with a dynamic map on a website. After checking it out for about 5 minutes I noticed some weird CPU usage so I asked the server admins. They apparently to came to an agreement with the players where, to support the server, a browser miner would be ran on the dynamic map website.

I would like to get chunks off of a community grid like Nunet... There is a mod that adds LODs these days, CPU-intensive, so with a nice view the real estate does become a little valuable doesn't it? :)

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

#479

Post by Nextgrid »

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.

I'd argue it's the opposite.

Crypto is fairly easy to avoid as an individual - the only thing I can think of that crypto has "contaminated" is GPU prices. Otherwise, don't get involved and just watch and laugh at the dumpster fire from a safe distance. You don't have to get involved in crypto to participate in society.

Advertising on the other hand is very hard to avoid, and even blocking the ads themselves doesn't isolate you from its nasty effects such as the constant tracking and that a lot of products nowadays pivoted to be ad delivery mechanisms (try to buy a consumer-grade TV that doesn't show ads or spy on you). A lot of products & services you need to use to participate in society are involved with advertising and may sell out your data (and providing fake data might be impossible/illegal). Even some government departments (DMV, etc) do it.

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

#480

Post by danuker »

buran77 wrote: post #447
rekoil wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 withou…

The supposed usefulness of the work sacrificed in proof-of-work is to prevent Sybil attacks on the network.

An attacker can spawn millions of virtual nodes, yet they will never hijack consensus because of the objectively-measurable resource sacrifice.

While there may be too much reward for this sacrifice currently, the idea is a sound one.

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