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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

#571

Post by tsss »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #292
Mindwipe wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see why it's attractive when the alternative is no card at all.

The alternative is not "no card" it's "don't buy a top of the line card" Every expensive product with potential commercial use has this situation. Anything you can easily make money with has a price that reflects it. People who want stuff for limited use cannot justify those kinds of prices so they have to buy older stuff, lesser stuff or stuff that needs effort/time dumped in in order to work.

The alternative _is_ no card. Even 5 year old cards are twice the MSRP if you can get them.

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

#572

Post by sam0x17 »

amelius wrote: post #545
cupofpython wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Ads no longer work online, period. The ad industry is just 10 years behind acknowledging it. Most of what people pay for is just paying for the organic traffic you'd normally get with no ads so they don't give it to someone else. It's more of a protection racket than it is a source of genuine new customers.

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

#573

Post by quinnjh »

Lascaille wrote: post #499
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 fairly easy to avoid as an individual It's probably contributing more to inflation than people believe. Both in the demand for resources and in terms of redistribution of wealth. Although probably not as much as the new work-from-home paradigm.

Couldnt be the thousands of dollars handed out, making markets discount the dollar, could it?

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

#574

Post by throwaway1777 »

swalsh wrote: post #328
ihateolives wrote: post #269

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 :)

A printer has never made my entire system unable to boot. I've experienced an issue where gnome just grey screens and it takes me hours to diagnose and fix.

That has more to do with a screen being pretty essential to running a system than driver quality.

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

#575

Post by asddubs »

ggreg84 wrote: post #224
mjg59 wrote: post #208

There are two scenarios where carrying out their threat plausibly helps the open source community: 1) A source drop demonstrates that Nvidia incorporated GPLed code into their drivers. This is, honestly, unlikely - Nvidia has sufficiently competent lawyers to ensure that everyone they employ is extremely aware of what the consequences of that would be 2) The source drop includes the private keys used to sign Nvidia G…

From the Nouveau devs themselves: https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961 They claim that leaking anything would actually make their work significantly harder.

I doubt the hackers are actually trying to help open source, it probably just occured to them that open sourcing would be a way to somewhat future-proof them not putting those restrictions back in for the next generation of cards

I'm not sure if they actually have the expectation that nvidia will meet their demands at all, I certainly wouldn't. Because why would nvidia trust that their word that they won't leak anything is meaningful?

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

#576

Post by selfportrait »

eru wrote: post #222
selfportrait wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entire chain of replies is skewed. Yes, real world mining is a serious offender, but that doesn’t exempt crypto mining. Have one look at one photograph of a crypto mining farm for one second and this will be obvious to anyone. On the point of double spend - collusion in bitcoin mining is very possible and decentralization is not as strong as claimed. There are tons of studies about this. https://cowles.yale.edu/…

> Yes, real world mining is a serious offender, but that doesn’t exempt crypto mining. Agreed, they have essentially nothing in common apart from the name. > Have one look at one photograph of a crypto mining farm for one second and this will be obvious to anyone. Why? You can get pretty bad pictures of eg factory farming, too; still that doesn't mean people will stop eating factory farmed meat. > On the point of dou…

> Agreed, they have essentially nothing in common apart from the name.

I don’t know if it’s your English, but you just said you agreed that crypto mining is an offender on the level of other forms of mining.

> Why? You can get pretty bad pictures of eg factory farming, too; still that doesn't mean people will stop eating factory farmed meat.

Except there are people who stop eating meat, reduce their intake, and there are advances in meat alternatives in the market. This is whataboutism 101. It’s quite frankly ignorant.

> The pdf you linked says nothing about double spending.

The PDF I linked is about bitcoin mining collusion, one of bitcoin’s flaws. If you knew anything about collusion and the consequences of a potential 51% attack, double spending is one of the central topics.

Your entire post sounds like paid misinformation.

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

#577

Post by [deleted] »

ggreg84 wrote: post #224
mjg59 wrote: post #208

There are two scenarios where carrying out their threat plausibly helps the open source community: 1) A source drop demonstrates that Nvidia incorporated GPLed code into their drivers. This is, honestly, unlikely - Nvidia has sufficiently competent lawyers to ensure that everyone they employ is extremely aware of what the consequences of that would be 2) The source drop includes the private keys used to sign Nvidia G…

From the Nouveau devs themselves: https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961 They claim that leaking anything would actually make their work significantly harder.

[deleted]

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

#578

Post by kobalsky »

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…

unless my reading comprehension is failing me, they are threatening to release nvidia's hardware design files, not the driver source code.

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

#579

Post by nybble41 »

7steps2much wrote: post #271
rocqua wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributing the keys is illegal, but what about using they keys and distributing the resulting signed firmware?

IANAL but I could imagine that this leads to different problems in some jurisdictions. Depending on how you look at it using another's entity's cryptographic key to sign something that then "pretends" to have been produced by that entity might classify as forgery. Though this is just my personal thoughts, not sure if that would hold up in practice. Technically you own the hardware, so "forging" the signature yourself…

> Depending on how you look at it using another's entity's cryptographic key to sign something that then "pretends" to have been produced by that entity might classify as forgery.

Perhaps, if you were attempting to make that claim to an actual person in a commercial context, deceiving them for personal gain. But in the context of "pretending" only to the hardware? Unlikely, as hardware has no standing in court. Even for-profit distribution shouldn't be an issue so long as it's clear to the human recipients that the signature is only present to fulfill technical requirements and the item wasn't actually produced by the other entity.

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

#580

Post by arcticbull »

dgs_sgd wrote: post #570
arcticbull wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Video game skins become NFTs that you now "own" instead of just being in-game. This use case actually doesn't make sense if you think about it. Items only make sense in the context of a game, and you trust the game makers to honor it. At that point, there's no incentive for them to actually allow you to port in/port out items. Think about it this way: what good is the BFG from Unreal Tournament in Cooking Mama? Eve…

if the game itself runs via a decentralized computational model then there’s no need to appeal to authority to honor the ownership. The game itself, just like the skin, would exist on the p2p network. We are of course very far from that happening, or knowing if it can happen, but it’s still a possibility to consider

You have to make a game that supports every item. There's no such thing as a "generic" game. Games have balance - hours are spent tweaking relative attributes of items to ensure the game is, you know, fun. For instance, what's to stop me from making an NFT nuclear launcher item on my own, then porting it in and wiping out everyone else's stuff?
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