Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 693 posts

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

#581

Post by arcticbull »

foobar2021 wrote: post #567
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…

A more interesting example would be From software issuing a “moonlight sword” nft (maybe for an achievement like 100% elden ring) and various indie devs creating souls-like games choosing to honor it within their game.

But again, not only is that trustful (after all, the "moonlight sword" name, image, etc, are subject to copyright and trademark) if From decides to allow that they can just open an API.

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

#582

Post by charcircuit »

eganist wrote: post #441
charcircuit wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring an ASIC to mine centralizes mining. Everyone should be able to contribute to the consensus process which is why GPU mining exists. There is a large number of people who already have comupters with graphics cards in them.

> Requiring an ASIC to mine centralizes mining. As compared to graphics cards where people are largely buying cards and dedicating them to the task, how does the use of ASICs centralize mining?

>how does the use of ASICs centralize mining?

Because any gamer with modern hardware can choose to mine and make a little bit of money

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

#584

Post by outside1234 »

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…

Can we please just jump to the end and make it illegal to transfer Crypto to Fiat?

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

#585

Post by jessaustin »

jl2718 wrote: post #458
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 have a dream of solving this with extreme-infungibility of a currency system. I’m sure every ancient civilization noticed this problem when the ease of trade that came with common currency resulted in the incentive to be conquered and taxed from a foreign land.

Those who had gold but no army, soon had neither. ISTM gold and other substances of "concentrated value" are inherently more dangerous than other things that ancient people could have stored, like lumber or grain.

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

#586

Post by pvillano »

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…

a fun exercise would be to put something copyrighted in a key. sort of like they did with a prime number that one time

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

#587

Post by foobar2021 »

arcticbull wrote: post #581
foobar2021 wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more interesting example would be From software issuing a “moonlight sword” nft (maybe for an achievement like 100% elden ring) and various indie devs creating souls-like games choosing to honor it within their game.

But again, not only is that trustful (after all, the "moonlight sword" name, image, etc, are subject to copyright and trademark) if From decides to allow that they can just open an API.

“Is thing in wallet” strikes me as much easier to implement then n^2 api integrations across companies. It’d be easier to do the api method via drm platforms like steam at the cost of lock-in to those platforms; cross pc/console access to any item would be far from guaranteed. Outsourcing all of that logic to a centralized (ex google blockchain) or decentralized blockchain and wallet just seems like a more scalable (num of actors not tps) approach with a low barrier for entry for each individual actor.

Your comment about “trust” has little to do with the technology. It’s a cross between legal gray areas (which would need to be solved/accepted if this becomes the norm) and dogma surrounding web3. I tend to agree that this isn’t likely to happen unless from software essentially abandoned their ip for some reason. But if that happened, it’d be a cool way for the legacy to live in future games in a way that pays homage to the original creators. It’s a use case that makes much more sense then just copying a random gun from one game to another because there are years of history in the item.

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

#588

Post by wst_ »

sam0x17 wrote: post #572
amelius wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have rather different experience. Most people either don't care or don't know how to. Unless you're tech savvy you're watching ads. And if you're on mobile you're watching them anyway in many cases.

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

#589

Post by sjmm1989 »

paulmd wrote: post #512
Tetilio wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yes, that's always been the primary underlying reason AFAIK, there's too much licensed code involved in their driver stack, and they don't care to spend the time re-implementing those components.

Ironically, they wouldn't need to spend the time re-implementing those componenents and dealing with licenses if they had just made their code open source to begin with.

The community would likely gladly help them with anything we can help with; and licenses would be less of an issue. It wouldn't be the first time closed source stuff has been made alternatives to it in open source specifically for reasons like licensing. MP3 for instance... not a terribly hard thing to deal with anymore, but once upon a time ago..

Anyways. Nvidia's true reason for doing anything is ultimately in their namesake. They want people to be envious. Part of making people envious is to keep things they want away from them.

So, yeah... that's the real reason. If they actually gave a flying fuck about the rest of us, they wouldn't be that way.

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

#590

Post by danuker »

buran77 wrote: post #555
danuker wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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?

Without the reward, there would be no sacrifice. The reward drives the sacrifice, and it is strictly higher than the sacrifice, otherwise people would not sacrifice in order to lose money and waste resources.

Unfortunately, right now the value created is less than the sacrifice (and I agree with you), which is in turn less than the reward (see the next point).

> So in practice you'd be hard pressed to show the net value.

The Bitcoin transaction fees are higher than $300k/day [1]. So, at least that much value is provided to those transacting, otherwise they would not transact.

Unfortunately, the current implementation still adds a hefty (100x larger) inflationary reward on top - so miners make upwards of $30M/day. [2]

While such a ratio may have been useful in the early days, now that virtually everyone interested knows about Bitcoin, I argue (and agree with you) that this inflationary reward is excessive.

In addition, I argue that the resource sacrifice is excessive because this inflationary reward is excessive. Had the creator(s) of Bitcoin predicted the meteoric rise of the price, they would have diminished this reward more quickly than the current schedule. [3]

Maybe someone could fork a "Bitcoin Green" or whatnot, with the difference that the reward schedule is sped up, and hopefully it would gather a meaningful amount of hash power to prevent 51% attacks [4].

[1] - https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transaction-fees-usd

[2] - https://www.blockchain.com/charts/miners-revenue

[3] - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply

[4] - https://www.crypto51.app/

Post reply on HN