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

arstechnica.com

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

#541

Post by keymon-o »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #533
keymon-o wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am probably not that informed on who does what artificially and intentionally, but I still don’t see a point in justifying gaming usage over crypto usage. As far as destroying the planet argument goes, gamers could equally be limited to using a specifically designed devices for optimal gaming and entertainment purposes. Apart from the ability to check the GPU health, GPU providers could easily implement some hardwa…

>gamers could equally be limited to using a specifically designed devices for optimal gaming and entertainment purposes. We are trying, but crypto-bros are buying our cards. C'mon pay a bit more attention.

Trust me, I'd take your problem seriously if only those cards would speed up growing up for you, guys.

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

#542

Post by paulmd »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #242
randomhodler84 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry you are being outbid by another guy who wants to mine with a graphics card, but who are you to say that guy securing a censorship resistant and decentralized monetary system is less legit than your leisure time amateur rocket league tournament? If the owner uses it to train a ML model? Is that legit then? Or can general purpose GPUs only be single purpose for games. For gamers?

> decentralized monetary system Binance. Mt Gox. QuadrigaCX. Crytopia. Poly Network. Yeah, decentralised. Also, censorship resistant? Tell that to people having their accounts on the "decentralised" money system being banned for using crypto that's gone through a mixer. The public blockchain makes censoring a given user even easier, because your transaction log is public knowledge.

> Mt Gox

I always loved this one. Magic The Gathering Online: Exchange.

No, that's not a joke, the owner took a pre-existing website for trading Magic cards and turned it into a crypto exchange. And no, that's not a typo, it's not "Magic The Gathering: Online Exchange", they weren't even trading the real cards, they were virtual cards for the game Magic The Gathering: Online.

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

#543

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #344
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…

I'm sure many people would agree with your diagnosis. What's the treatment, though?

I think the most straightforward thing would be to regulate mining operations as money transmitters and smart contracts as derivatives. Several jurisdictions have made noises about doing this; it seems to be more a matter of political will than any fundamental difficulty.

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

#544

Post by randomhodler84 »

cbozeman wrote: post #192
randomhodler84 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worthless, because they just keep printing them and giving them away to VCs, who then sucker engineers into building em a product/ecosystem. You will see it eventually David!

> Also worthless, because they just keep printing them and giving them away to VCs You literally just described what's happened with fiat currencies in the past decade. Endless printing of money and giving it away to big banks. I guess you'll see it eventually randomhodler84.

I know, that is why I am bullish on Bitcoin and bearish on shitcoins.

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

#545

Post by amelius »

cupofpython wrote: post #520
sam0x17 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

looks like there might be an emerging market for 60-inch computer monitors

Sadly, I suspect adtech is already working to target them too. What better way to fight adblockers?

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

#546

Post by buran77 »

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.

> you can only imagine proof of clapping hands because yes that example is useless.

People do it all the time, it must have something. But no practical value. But let's not argue for the sake of arguing. It's like saying Ponzi schemes are good otherwise so many people wouldn't be into them. Or any example of things so many people do that have no value and we'd really rather they stopped.

Proof of Whatever is just about gobbling up some resource (sometimes with incredibly high cost for society in general) for some artificially driven value but of no practical positive consequences to almost anyone in the world. Except for the few that are incentivized to make it look more valuable because they've invested and its actual value never changed. It's still a solution waiting for a problem.

And before you argue more, the computer and internet you're using to post your opinions were created with far less waste and provide far more value. If they go away tomorrow the world will suffer a lot, society will literally regress decades. If proof of waste goes away the "investors" in the pyramid will suffer for being tricked and the rest of the world wouldn't bat an eye.

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

#548

Post by hemloc_io »

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…

Crypto is easy to avoid "for now".

The endgame for crypto is tokenizing everything in some peoples eyes.

Video game skins become NFTs that you now "own" instead of just being in-game. So you can transfer them around, sell them on composable markets etc.

Assuming things actually get worked out you could see a merging of the digital and physical worlds assets.

If this a good thing, or will even happen who knows.

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

#549

Post by Godel_unicode »

vageli wrote: post #496
Godel_unicode wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I take it you haven't tried to buy a 30-series GPU for gaming, then. It's impossible*, and that's because of mining*. * Yeah, yeah, I know, supply chain this and pandemic demand that, but it's really mining that's the culprit.

Seems that they are available? https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007709%20601357282

If you have been watching, this has literally changed in the last two weeks (also, compare those prices to MSRP). It's not a coincidence that this is happening at the same time that Ethereum moving to proof of stake has become real to people.

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

#550

Post by Nextgrid »

einpoklum wrote: post #507
Nextgrid wrote: post #479

Earlier 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?

Any consumer-grade "smart" product (whether TV or home automation) now phones home (even though it can run entirely locally on the LAN), requires an account and collects data and the (often mandatory) mobile app will typically include various advertising malware such as the Facebook SDK, analytics, etc that spy on you.

The primary objective is "growth and engagement" aka an ad delivery mechanism (or data collection mechanism for more ads down the line). The functionality of the product (if any) is merely a necessary evil (from the manufacturer's point of view) to convince the mark to buy & "engage" with the device. If they could get people to "engage" with it without any functionality they'd definitely do that instead.

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