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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

#481

Post by Nextgrid »

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.

I'd prefer that to ads.

With crypto mining I can buy my way out of it by having powerful hardware, or - in a hypothetical future where this practice is mainstream - offloading the mining to a separate machine as to not affect my mobile device's CPU. Crypto miners have a defined price: give me an average CPU's hashrate while you stay on the page and that's it - so if you pay that you are good.

With ads, buying your way out is impossible - by attempting to do so you just become an even bigger target. There is no define price for it that you can pay to "opt out".

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

#482

Post by shkkmo »

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…

> people will start directly using these currency for payments (which they already do) without exchanging to fiat

Without fiat exchange, People can only accept crypto in an economically feasible manner as payments up to the rate that they have expenses/outflows that can be paid in crypto. The price will only be able to stabilize at a price that is orders of magnitude lower than today. How much lower exactly depends on the health of the black market for exchanging with fiat.

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

#483

Post by sylware »

That's why tegra "crippled" driver went into libdrm just recently? Bad timing? Or is this to prepare code "release" namely some full open source driver support? That said, "open source" is not enough anymore: Lean code using simple and very stable in time C (C89 with benign bits of c99/c11 and no more) is as much as important nowadays. Cyber Robin Wood.

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

#484

Post by Nextgrid »

hirako2000 wrote: post #426
seanw444 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

interesting point of comparison. the much bigger cost of ads is probably the attention loss. we don't have much attention capacity. ads increasingly syphon it. I guestimate that attention loss for an average person is worth order of magnitude more than the extra cpu tearing + bandwidth costs required to run ads. but like for your comparison, most users aren't even realising they are paying a significant mental cost b…

It's not just a mental cost - someone has to pay for those ads and all the machinery & various middlemen that make it possible. That someone is all of us; the prices we pay for most goods include the overhead of polluting society with ads. You end up paying a double tax - a monetary one and an attention one.

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

#485

Post by Consultant32452 »

bart_spoon wrote: post #439
icejjfish wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was sympathetic to that view right up until the Canadian government froze the bank accounts of the truckers. Now I'm openly supportive of the activities the regimes don't like in crypto.

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

#486

Post by danuker »

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…

> because there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service.

On my free personal blog, I have nothing for sale, and nobody discovers it in spite of the ones that do read it enjoying it.

Another problem of advertising oligopolies monetizing everything is, if you don't pay them, you are invisible.

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

#487

Post by rhn_mk1 »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #412
danuker wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> Maybe that's the difference?

The difference is that free drivers don't have access to changing the GPU frequency in newer cards. Newer means anything above NV110, that is, 900-series.

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

#488

Post by hirako2000 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #484
hirako2000 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting point of comparison. the much bigger cost of ads is probably the attention loss. we don't have much attention capacity. ads increasingly syphon it. I guestimate that attention loss for an average person is worth order of magnitude more than the extra cpu tearing + bandwidth costs required to run ads. but like for your comparison, most users aren't even realising they are paying a significant mental cost b…

It's not just a mental cost - someone has to pay for those ads and all the machinery & various middlemen that make it possible. That someone is all of us; the prices we pay for most goods include the overhead of polluting society with ads. You end up paying a double tax - a monetary one and an attention one.

agreed. it's multiple costs. and we all pay for that waste and the long term consequences of it.

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

#489

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

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.

When working with hard/physical assets, one needs no proof of anything. The existence of the asset is the proof.

To me, there needs to be an effective counterbalance to the need for "proof" in the first place, otherwise we are simply prolonging the petrodollar's capability to exist in a world that is clearly quite ready to abandon it.

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

#490

Post by modeless »

qayxc wrote: post #231
modeless wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be nice. It really boggles the mind how thoroughly AMD has missed the boat on ML. And it really seems like they aren't on any trajectory to catch up even today. I've given up on them. Instead I'm hoping that Intel's imminent entry into the discrete GPU market does better. Nvidia is in desperate need of some competent competition in ML.

You seem to overlook the fact that NVIDIA poured immense resources into their ML software stack. This was back in AMD's Bulldozer days (2011), when the company struggled both financially and technologically. Meanwhile NVIDIA sponsored universities with graphics cards and had already developed their CUDA ecosystem (in 2007) when AMD was still busy with the ATI acquisition. In 2011 NVIDIA had an annual net income of ab…

It's been obvious for 10+ years now that AI was not only incredibly important but also a ginormous market opportunity up for grabs. To the extent that they were cash strapped they should have reprioritized. The effort would have paid for itself many times over. And that excuse no longer holds water now that AMD's market cap rivals Intel's and they're still not investing enough or making the right technical decisions. There must be deeper problems.
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