Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure many people would agree with your diagnosis. What's the treatment, though?
Time. Crypto is a speculative digital commodity bubble. We haven't seen a real bear market yet. Gold took 7 years from 1973 when you could own gold again to the 1980 peak. All the increase in gold mining lead to a 20 year bear market. The crypto narrative is fundamentally unsustainable. It doesn't just have to beat the S&P 500 returns, people need to believe they are going to get rich. That November 2021 peak is goin…
Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
511–520 of 693 posts
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#512Earlier 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…
Is t there a ton of IP and patents which can't be made open source? There should not be much of an issue for Nvidia to open source it otherwise. Open source doesn't mean free anyway
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#514Earlier 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.
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 wa…
I disagree. It's just not in its final form yet. But take a peek:
Hulu: 6.99 with ads, 12.99 without
Youtube: Free with ads, 11.99 without (or bundled with another google paid service, like Fi)
HBO: 9.99 with ads, 14.99 without
---
It's coming - if you have money to throw at the problem, you can already buy your way out of a lot of advertising.
If you have time and a bit of technical savvy - setting up a pihole or ublock origin incurs costs on time, but also remove ads.
At least with ads the cost is fairly clear, and it's definite. With mining... it's mostly malicious and will consume as much CPU as it can. That actually taxes me more for having a nice CPU.
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure many people would agree with your diagnosis. What's the treatment, though?
Time. Crypto is a speculative digital commodity bubble. We haven't seen a real bear market yet. Gold took 7 years from 1973 when you could own gold again to the 1980 peak. All the increase in gold mining lead to a 20 year bear market. The crypto narrative is fundamentally unsustainable. It doesn't just have to beat the S&P 500 returns, people need to believe they are going to get rich. That November 2021 peak is goin…
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#516> 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…
I can suggest a good reason why the Nvidia GPU drivers are opaque binary blobs. Generally speaking, you don't build a multi-billion transistor chip, and manage to ship the A01 spin without doing some magic. The Nvidia GPU i/o interface is a remarkable mechanism where the resource manager (the code that sits at the very lowest level) can patch the hardware interface to get around hardware issues and give the appearanc…
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#517Earlier 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…
Oh, tell me about it. +Installs Linux, this time determined to make it daily driver. Why is this so slow though? - You need to install Nvidia drivers + Oh, OK makes sense. -- INSTALLS NVIDIA DRIVERS -- -- LINUX NO LONGER BOOTS, OBSCURE ERROR MESSAGE, FURIOUSLY GOOGLING ON A TINY PHONE SCREEN TRYING TO RESOLVE THE ISSUE -- Later made myself a Hackintosh, eventually bought an actual Mac. The Hackintosh stuff was much,…
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#518Earlier 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…
Normal games and applications won't just max the whole memory bus at 100% for hours and hours. Even in a high-load situation it will still bounce around 90-100% or whatever. Mining absolutely slams the memory bus 100%, because current implementations are Proof Of Bandwidth so that's the stat you need to maximize.
Normal games or applications will go out of their way to align threads in a warp to access contiguous memory blocks ("coalesced memory access"), because that can be efficiently handled as a single request and broadcast to every thread. Mining can't do that because every thread is working in a totally different place in memory determined by the DAG. So normal applications will have lots of coalescing happening, mining will have zero.
Normal games or applications will have cache hits, because they're re-using at least some data frequently. Mining will have an (effectively) 0% cache hit rate because the DAG is sending threads to random places in memory and memory is much larger than cache.
These are simple things that can be metered with O(1) performance counters on the hardware. If the card sees a load like that, run in cripple mode, nuke the memory bus to 10% performance. Then you can also add the capability for a whitelist - the driver can attest that a certain binary has been signed by windows from the appropriate vendor, and TPM can attest that the driver and hardware hasn't been tampered with (Remote Attestation). So no need to worry about legacy code or DIY cuda code unless it happens to look like a mining application, and then you can whitelist any edge-cases.
TPM is going to be mandatory for OEM Windows 11 systems - home builders technically don't need it, but then if they happen to run some code that performs 100% random unaligned memory access you'd have to get it signed. But most code doesn't behave anything like that, so that is a real edge-case unless you are trying to write a miner.
You may be morally opposed to the above, but it's not impossible at a technical level, mining code actually looks nothing like normal code at a perfcounter level.
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think banning fiat conversion would stop this. There are bonds and stable currency issued peg to the defi or crypto world. It would reduce the value but it's unstoppable. See fei: https://fei.money/ Proof of work or hardware intensive proofs are only used in a few crypto currency so this is a very blunt response in regards to banning exchange.
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.
Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
The only good panels now are also "smart" tvs with something like a roku or samsung spyware built in in an unavoidable way. You can't simply change inputs to avoid it because the whole OS you're changing inputs within is the smart TV's OS.