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

arstechnica.com

521–530 of 693 posts

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

#521
post #9

>"We decided to help mining and gaming community," I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. Wouldn't this drive up the crypto-motivated demand for GPUs even more and hurt the gaming community?

> I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community. It doesn't. This is just miners co-opting an old argument to gain sympathy.

I'm not even sure this is really miners, or just garden-variety ransomware/extortion hackers who are trying to co-opt several old arguments (first LHR, now open-source) to gain sympathy.

Even "we're doing this for the miners because we oppose artificial product segmentation!" is far more sympathetic than "we're doing this for ourselves, because we like money".

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

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>With ads, buying your way out is impossible 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 o…

You can buy your way out of ads in some places, but you can never buy your way out of the invasive tracking.

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

#523
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No single piece of software has wasted more of my time than Nvidia's drivers I see you haven't used printers much :)

I had to install a new inkjet printer because kids now need to print out their homework during COVID. I swear to god if I ever become wealthy the printer industry is what I intended to completely destroy . Not in it for profit. Not positive sum whatever startup thinking. It will be Zero Sum. Edit: Lasers are fine. That will be left alone.

Is now a bad time to put down your pom poms and pitch it on kickstarter?

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

#524
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In fairness, it's hardly an outrageous view to want to remove artificial performance bottlenecks on a piece of hardware you've spent a considerable amount of money on.

That's how the market works though. Your AMD 290X had artificial performance bottlenecks created (gimped FP64, driver performance limiter for enterprise software, etc) so that AMD could sell more Radeon WX cards. Your AMD APU has ECC artificially disabled so that AMD can sell more Ryzen Pro APUs. Your Epyc has its overclocking controls artificially disabled. etc etc. Those are accepted and normal practices to determine "what you can do with the hardware you paid for" in the industry.

Miners are just mad that they got a free ride for a lot of years and are now being shifted to their own segment to try and control the infinite demand they tend to periodically create. But they are a money-making asset in a business, nobody cried a tear when AMD and NVIDIA forced Raytheon to pay a premium to buy Quadros to run their CAD software at the full performance levels the hardware is capable of.

Also, generally speaking this arrangement is beneficial for consumers: if you outlawed artificial segmentation tomorrow, companies aren't going to hugely lower their prices and give up all that revenue from the enterprise market, they are going to raise prices in the consumer market. The alternative to gimped Celeron chips isn't that you get Xeon capability for Celeron prices, it's that you pay much closer to Xeon prices for your celeron. Which is like, several times as much.

That R&D has to be paid for somewhere, and margins are not all that huge considering the total lifecycle (the chips are cheap once you make them, but the R&D for the first chip costs billions). You can't just give up 80% of your enterprise revenue and make a go of it. If we really did have Xeon for Celeron prices, the alternative would be much longer product cycles and other belt-tightening in the R&D department. The beige box market has a huge business component too and they won’t have any qualms about an extra $200 on every cpu if that’s what it costs. It’s just gonna suck personally for you as a consumer.

Consumers are the “price sensitive” market that benefits from price discrimination, in this instance, and product segmentation is how you allow that. Take that away and those price-sensitive markets are the ones that will pay more, because business pricing is very inelastic and quantities are very large. They don’t care about you buying one celeron every 5 years as much as the business who buys 1000 office desktops every 3 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

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

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except no one professional would touch the leaked source with a 10 ft poll. Expect continued clean room reverse engineering or get sued.

Of course they will review it in their spare time. They wouldn’t copy it, but they could certainly learn insights and apply them in their architectures.

No, they won't. Any competitors and any open-source projects will advise their engineers to stay as far away from it as possible.

It's a clean-room engineering situation, if you've even looked at it you're legally contaminated and you're now a liability to the parent company/project's IP. And now those projects have to be hyper-aware of any contributors who might "sneak in" a bit of NVIDIA code that gets the whole project taken down.

https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961

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

#527

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…

But the example is untrue. The nerds are still hosting free content.

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

#528
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If con artists convinced speculative investors to spend millions of dollars on Tesla Model 3s, light them on fire, and dump them into the ocean, I would not blame Tesla for the reduced availability of Model 3s.

Tesla still got paid.

that's irrelevant to the point about demand

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

#529
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.

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.

Gridcoin (the cryptocurrency you're referring to) doesn't actually use the scientific computation as proof-of-work. It's built on proof-of-stake. It just also happens to have minting set up so new coins go to people doing scientific computation, in a process that superficially resembles proof-of-work mining. The paying-people-to-do-scientific-computation part is purely something extra and isn't strictly necessary in its design to make it work as a cryptocurrency.

(It's kind of splitting hairs, but I see gridcoin brought up a lot by people arguing stuff like "Proof of stake isn't the answer. Proof of work is still good, we just need more useful proof of work" which is a big misunderstanding of it. Useful scientific computation generally doesn't work as proof-of-work and is not an example of it even in the context of Gridcoin. Only specific kinds of computation can work for proof-of-work, and the computation being useful in other contexts actually harms its usefulness for proof-of-work because it can allow the computation for 51% attacks to be subsidized by the other uses of the computation.)

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

#530
post #155
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true at all. If enough hardware is available, pool only expands until reward covers electricity cost plus small margin. I.e. bitcoin mining electricity-cost bound for the long time now.

Electricity costs plus cost of capital (etc).

in practice that's not even true because some miners are willing to run negative margins because they extract value elsewhere in the process

(the most prominent example is stolen electricity, but also for many miners it's a form of cash laundering. You always get less money out than you put in, but it's clean cash. In China's case they can't get money past capital controls, but you can mine at a loss and sell the bitcoins in a jurisdiction of your choice, that's worth something to them. Also, many miners are front-running exchange trades or extracting other forms of economic value.)

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