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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

#551

Post by ganzuul »

AgentME wrote: post #529
ganzuul wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Point taken. Duplication of effort could be argued is proof of work but perhaps that is splitting hairs.

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

#552

Post by abecedarius »

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 resource curse is that natural resources go together with oppressive government: the former can promote the latter in that an oppressor needs some form of wealth to pay their minions/allies, and international sales of extracted resources are a source of wealth that makes fewer demands on widespread cooperation from the locals than does local development.

How does this map to crypto? Who's the oppressive government we're getting more of?

It's correct that crypto changes the economics, and I'd say that's a good thing. We've tried leaving economics out of our core means of cooperation online for a few decades, and we don't seem very happy with the feudal internet that that led to. Let's try expanding the range of ways of coordinate and to fund work, with e.g. https://gitcoin.co/

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

#553

Post by hemloc_io »

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…

Devils advocate here, but crypto does disrupt a free sharing economy that's on the internet and part of the magic of it.

Yet maybe there are benefits in terms of making previously economically inviable things viable. People making passion projects are great, but at the end of the day they are creating value for people that's almost never reciprocated in other ways and tokenizing things lets them capture that value or add new value to what their selling.

e.g. with NFTs right now you have three parties, the buyer -> who gets provenance ("ownership") the digital artist -> who makes more money off their art than was possible before because rarity is built into the price now. (Non-fungible, unlike selling prints tshirts etc.) everyone else -> who can still copy and share the work for free, as before.

I feel like this should be a growth engine for digital artists, that has minimal impact on the general public, and everyone walks away happy with the transaction. (Putting aside scams b/c the market is unregulated, environmental concerns, etc. just talking economics.)

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

#554

Post by sterlind »

gryn wrote: post #408
josefx wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that Linux, on a default configuration (which means, ISO with Nouveau) To this day I cannot think of a good reason to ship nouveau outside of "lets make users with nvidia cards suffer". I get the idea behind the nouveau project, but pushing an experimental driver that cannot work with 99% of the hardware it latches onto and forces users to disable it if they want a basic working system is actively malicious.

I don't know the last time you used nouveau drivers but this is just wrong. is it feature complete ? no, but to go ahead and say it's not working for 99% is just lying here is the list: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html what you can say though is that it is a bad idea for GPU that are relatively recent. wont block you from booting or displaying to screen but would probably be slow. also this is distr…

for years I'd give nouveau a try and see if it could run Wayland. for years I'd get a black screen and have to repair in GRUB (or, thankfully, roll back in the boot screen on NixOS.)

since it doesn't do CUDA either, nouveau is useless to me. next Linux build I'll either use Intel or AMD, but can't economically do ML on AMD still.

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

#555

Post by buran77 »

danuker wrote: post #480
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…

The supposed usefulness of the work sacrificed in proof-of-work is to prevent Sybil attacks on the network. An attacker can spawn millions of virtual nodes, yet they will never hijack consensus because of the objectively-measurable resource sacrifice. While there may be too much reward for this sacrifice currently, the idea is a sound one.

> The supposed usefulness of the work sacrificed in proof-of-work is to prevent Sybil attacks

The usefulness of PoW is to reinforce a system that produces something. Presumably the higher the value of that something, the more you're willing to waste enabling it. If you're burning through an estimated 110TWh of electricity per year (as of last year, one Netherland's worth) enabling that system, you should be able to show one Netherland's worth of value being created.

> While there may be too much reward for this sacrifice currently

You probably meant it the other way around, too much sacrifice for the reward. Wouldn't the concept of creating value imply that net value was created?

> the idea is a sound one.

In theory many ideas are but the implementation matters. So in practice you'd be hard pressed to show the net value. And I'm not talking about showing me 1 BTC is worth $50.000 more than you can say a defunct company is worth billions because some was doing a pump and dump.

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

#556

Post by ckastner »

Leherenn wrote: post #467
uncomputation wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it’s the red queen’s race problem. If LHR is lifted, your hash rate will rise, but so will everyone else’s, so you are either (1) no better off or (2) worse off because other people may use this increased efficiency per chip to buy more chips, thus increasing their hash power proportionally. No one will ever decrease their hash power.

Won't your hash rate rise more than the average hash rate since not all cards are LHR cards?

Yes, your slice of the pie would improve more than the average slice, but the size of the overall pie would be much smaller.

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

#557

Post by jart »

ckastner wrote: post #315
jart wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but no. The ransomers probably invested a considerable sum buying up every last used LHR card beforehand, so they'd stand to gain if Nvidia changed their policy. That's likely how they'll get caught.

If they had tons of LHR cards and the code to unlock them, the last thing they would do is share the unlock code with others (= the competition).

It's not like typing in a Faxanadu code. The ransomers are sitting on a mess of confidential information they lifted from Nvidia and they likely have zero clue how it all works. Keeping it to themselves was probably the original plan, but once they got a taste for how tragic engineering is behind the curtain their only chance for recuperating the investment became (1) forcing Nvidia to write the driver update for them; or (2) leak it and hope some open source developer volunteers.

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

#558

Post by Nextgrid »

hemloc_io wrote: post #548
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…

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.

Crypto is held back by its own stupidity & inefficiency - the system self-regulates well enough.

The only thing a blockchain is good for is assets that fully live on the blockchain for which the source of truth is the blockchain itself - like cryptocurrencies.

Putting NFTs, video game/metaverse avatars, real-world assets, etc will never work; it's at best a very inconvenient, inefficient database replacement, and at worst a scam.

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

#559

Post by opan »

moffkalast wrote: post #399
Filligree wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NixOS has this decently solved. “Some assembly required”, but at least you can switch between versions without messing up your system. So long as the driver doesn’t change, you can even run multiple versions simultaneously and nothing will break.

Imagine having to install a different OS to run something, what year is this?

Nix, the package manager, can at least be used on other distros.

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

#560

Post by opan »

marcosdumay wrote: post #382
chmod775 wrote: post #5

> 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…

Personally, I just switched to AMD and never had to think about GPU drivers again. Ok, I do have to add the non-free firmware when I install Debian, once every installation. But there are no random problems all the time, no "your card is too old for your computer to keep working", no "your card is too new for your computer", basically nothing more than adding a single package. I imagine NVidia works really well on Wi…

The non-free firmware is a shame. There are basically no modern GPUs that work with linux-libre because of it. This issue doesn't get much attention.
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