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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

#501

Post by modeless »

jstanley wrote: post #252
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…

Why don't you just not buy Nvidia hardware?

Because I care about ML which AMD has been utterly failing at for 10 years running.

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

#502

Post by Kon-Peki »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #487
Kon-Peki wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the info!

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

#503

Post by sleepybrett »

bigcheesegs wrote: post #380
z3c0 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you overall - this does appear to be another resource curse - but I want to point out that the culprits in this matter are the companies that bottleneck the overly-abundant resources for profit (so Nvidia and Google), not the users who attempt to bleed constrained value through that bottleneck. Nvidia used their near-monopolistic power over the graphics card market in an attempt to globally limit the has…

> it seems very obviously a move to force miners to use more GPUs in parallel This is very obviously wrong. The economics of crypto mining are almost entirely dominated by power cost. Nvidia's decision here simply means they will use other hardware, not more of the LHR hardware. Nvidia already can't make enough GPUs to satisfy demand. Why would they try to increase undesirable demand (which is going away soon anyway,…

I'm not sure nvidia actually sees mining as 'undesirable demand' .. sells cards, makes them money. They wouldn't give a shit if people were buying them to use as firewood.

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

#504

Post by flatiron »

cornegidouille wrote: post #431
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 mi…

who would fab their chips though? i can only imagine tsmc getting an obvious nvidia knock off and refusing to fab it for them for fear nvidia would take their cards somewhere else to fab.

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

#505

Post by einpoklum »

Oh, I really wish those hackers would release the sources rather than pursue their dumbass crypto-mining demands... "We decided to help mining and gaming community" - hurting the gaming community, helping the get-rich-quick "community".

My own C++ wrappers for the CUDA APIs (shameless self-plug: https://github.com/eyalroz/cuda-api-wrappers/) would really benefit a lot from behind-the-curtains access to the driver; and even if I just know how the internal logic of the driver and the runtime works, without actually being able to hook into that logic - I would already be able to leverage this somewhat in my design considerations.

Also, NVIDIA has definitely had this coming in its choice to promote its own proprietary execution ecosystem (CUDA), rather than build everything up over OpenCL or over both; and in keeping so much of its code clsoed.

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

#506

Post by kmeisthax »

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…

Pedant nit: Intel and AMD CPUs also both have mandatory signed firmware with higher privilege levels[0] than Linux. Blame enterprises that want owner-operated backdoors into their own system.

It's still not as egregious as Nvidia's though, which is specifically designed as a defeat device to frustrate the use of third-party drivers. You at least don't need ME/PSP access to boot into a Free OS.

[0] ME/PSP are technically separate processors, but they have full control over the x86 cores. Their firmware can be minimized but they are integral to the boot process and enforce code signing on the BIOS. Speaking of, the BIOS gets to load into SMM, which has been around since the 386 and runs above both ring 0 and hypervisors.

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

#507

Post by einpoklum »

Nextgrid wrote: post #479
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.

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 i…

> try to buy a consumer-grade TV that doesn't show ads or spy on you

I haven't bought a consumer TV since... well, actually, I just haven't ever actually bought one except second-hand non-smart TVs a decade ago. Is it literally that bad? i.e. does everything show ads? Can you root these machines and/or install non-ad-based apps instead?

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

#508

Post by tomc1985 »

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.

No, rampant transactionalization/financialization is the cancer. Rent-seeking leeches trying to extract money out of previously neutral activity, growing unchecked. The very definition of cancer.

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

#509

Post by paulmd »

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…

Yeah, there was a lot of poor management from AMD though that led to them being in that situation, let's not pretend like it's just one day "oops we have no money".

(And nor was it "all Intel's fault" either, AMD fucked up a lot in this time period, both technically and in their business decisions)

At one point AMD was set to merge with NVIDIA but the board couldn't get over the sticking point of Jensen wanting to be CEO of the resulting company. Had the board swallowed their pride and let that happen, I doubt he would have led the company down the Bulldozer garden path.

Instead AMD said no, and then way overpaid for ATI, which depleted their cash reserves and forced them to sell their foundries (which was ultimately probably the correct long-term move, but that isn't the proximate reason why they sold them - they were just out of cash at the time). Then they had no money and had to underfund their architectures, and move to "cost reduction" mechanisms in the design and implementation, and had a series of implementation problems and poor designs.

Phenom was late (so much so that AMD had to put out a stopgap dual-socket "Quad FX" system just to try and compete against Core2 Quad) and Phenom had a major bug where part of the cache system had to be turned off, tanking performance by like >25%. And by the time Phenom II came out, AMD was putting non-SMT quadcores against Nehalem. By the time Bulldozer came out, the 8150 was going against Sandy Bridge, and by the time AMD fixed the worst of Bulldozer's performance problems, the 8350 was going against Ivy Bridge, and it still sucked anyway. AMD just executed extremely poorly in this period and a large part of that is the cash shortages resulting from buying ATI.

The next decade of AMD's financial woes largely spring from that moment when the AMD board said "no" to the merger, and the chain of decisions and failures that resulted. And while consoles might have saved the company - they likely would not have been in that position in the first place had they said yes to the merger instead of emptying the bank account to buy ATI, instead of doing a merger-of-equals with NVIDIA.

Also, AMD still isn't taking the steps that they can to increase their ML marketshare. They are actively reducing the support levels of their ROCm package - amateurs can easily get into the basics with a consumer NVIDIA gaming GPU while AMD forces you to buy a $5000 enterprise card.

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

#510

Post by mirntyfirty »

nightski wrote: post #473
buran77 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many people? How useful? What is the distribution of that useful amongst those people? At what cost does this useful stop being useful?
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