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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

#661

Post by ouid »

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.

I would like to be polite to you here, but it's going to be hard, because this take is wrong at every single level, and it feels like you haven't tried any sort of critical thinking whatsoever:

1) NFTs are the most expensive, least efficient way to implement the least interesting part of this technology. Even if you accept the dubious premise that they do even that job well.

2) You have explicitly described a system in which every single agreement between devs would require special testing. Is the moonlight sword balanced in the other game? Don't I still have to describe literally every aspecet of the moonlight sword other than who owns it in the second game?

3) Skins and other microtransactions are per game, by an absolute law of their design. That is the point. A game developer has no interest in honoring a microtransaction that I can prove that I paid some other game developer for. I would want my cut.

4) The condition upon which you have proposed that people can acquire the moonlight sword is... for beating Elden Ring? So it's a sign of status. Except that it's a sign of status that I can sell, so it's actually just a signal of wealth or status, maybe? Maybe I can't sell it. But wait, why did I make it an NFT then. So I must be able to sell it, but then it is presumed to have a dollar value, so why wouldn't Fromsoft sell it in the first place. Sounds a lot like a regular microtransaction.

Which brings me to my final point.

5) The market for microtransactions is already very optimized. Videogames are already very good at extracting every penny that people are willing to pay for bullshit cosmetics and play to win garbage. You can't even make money hucking this shit.

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

#663

Post by 7steps2much »

ggreg84 wrote: post #659
7steps2much wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between hardware that simply doesn't support a use case and hardware that technically supports stuff but was artificially locked to no longer do so. If the hardware was actually different then of course your argument would make sense, you could build cards that can only be used for a certain use case and sell those, but in that case you wouldn't have to lock down the card anyways

Reply in this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30568961

> The claim that this should be free because software and hardware costs nothing once you already have developed is illogical. CAD software, GPU driver software for CAD, and GPU hardware to meet CAD's demand, continues to evolve, which costs money.

I do agree with you, developers are expensive. And if i came across that way then that wasn't my intention.

If a gaming CPU doesn't support CAD tasks, never did so in the past and nobody expects them to suddenly do so.

However, what i personally was referring to is not lacking Software Support for a certain feature set but software throttling of Hardware.

Sadly it is something that happens a lot. Phones throttling because they received software updates, graphics cards pretending to be artificially slow because drivers include code specifically to slow them down.

In my opinion there is a big difference between "Sorry, we don't support that use case, but good luck to you" and "We are going to invest time to stop you from doing X"

The first is fine, it happens all the time. The second is (in my eyes) not.

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

#664

Post by tharne »

danaris wrote: post #442
matheusmoreira wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no benefit to society from allowing this. Sure there is. We get a financial system that's independent of banks and governments. I don't care how much energy it consumes, that's a worthy goal. Also, it's not even 1% of global energy consumption and even that calculation is based on rather questionable assumptions like "energy usage is proportional to bitcoin price". If you want to stop the burning of fossil…

> We get a financial system that's independent of banks and governments. I don't care how much energy it consumes, that's a worthy goal. I see it as exactly the opposite. We live in a society, and as a society, we have agreed upon certain rules about how money is handled. If you want to opt out of those rules, then get out of our society.

> We live in a society, and as a society, we have agreed upon certain rules about how money is handled. If you want to opt out of those rules, then get out of our society.

Even the friends of mine who work in the banking industry will tell you that the current financial system is a rigged game that serves the elite and well-connected at the expense of ordinary people.

Reasonable people can disagree about the relative benefits and harms of cryptocurrency, but trying to make the case that the current financial system reflects some sort of happy societal consensus is roughly on par with being a lobbyist for big tobacco.

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

#665

Post by tharne »

keymon-o wrote: post #294
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except there is nothing "fair" about this. In all fairness these crypto-bros could buy the cards specifically made for mining, but they won't because they don't have any resale value. Only reason they are buying GPUs is that they can run it until something better comes to market and still sell it to some gamer who is actually going to use the hardware for its intended purpose. More power to Nvidia. If I could make th…

Woah there. I don’t like the crypto culture and mindset as the next guy, but there are plenty of other options to preventing use case you presented. If systems aren’t closed enough already… And as far as the gaming goes, I cannot see how playing games is more noble usage of gpu than crypto mining.

> And as far as the gaming goes, I cannot see how playing games is more noble usage of gpu than crypto mining.

As usual the gaming crowd is utterly lacking in self-awareness.

"Hey, those crypto guys need to stop doing dumb things with GPUs so me and my friends can use that fancy hardware to waste hours of our lives pretending to be soldiers and race-car drivers on our computers in the basement"

Say what you will about the crypto crowd, at least they know people think they're ridiculous.

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

#666

Post by stuu99 »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#667

Post by NavinF »

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #650
NavinF wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works if you don’t care about deep learning or use any apps that need CUDA

Yeah but why do we blame linux if it's the official nvidia drivers that sucks and when the video cards doesn't work with acceleration if you don't use that driver that sucks? What is linux supposed to do?

I don’t care who’s to blame, but I’ll just say that the proprietary drivers work just fine on servers and I imagine they’d work fine on Desktop too if distros installed them automatically. Loads of people try Linux on a PC they already have instead of buying a new one that has upstream drivers for every component. This is yet another reason why Linux desktop will never have >2% market share.

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

#668

Post by NavinF »

pabs3 wrote: post #606
NavinF wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you leave power savings enabled? Cause that’s a recipe for disaster on Linux. My ML servers have years of uptime with “nvidia-smi -pm 0” in crontab and auto updates disabled. The latter prevents the CUDA version from getting ahead of the kernel module version. It’s a polished turd, but at least it works which is more than I can say for nouveau And yes you can distribute patches. Copyright only prevents you from d…

This was like 15 years ago (no idea about power savings stuff), I wouldn't touch the proprietary driver any more though. nouveau has been extremely stable for me when I used it up until last year. Patches contain parts of the original code, so I would class them as modified versions of the original code. Also the initial modification isn't allowed either, I wasn't really referring to distribution of the patches, just…

You’re talking about the EULA, not the copyright license. The EULA can certainly claim you’re not allowed to do that, but it’s also unenforceable in most places so who cares?

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

#669

Post by pabs3 »

NavinF wrote: post #668
pabs3 wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was like 15 years ago (no idea about power savings stuff), I wouldn't touch the proprietary driver any more though. nouveau has been extremely stable for me when I used it up until last year. Patches contain parts of the original code, so I would class them as modified versions of the original code. Also the initial modification isn't allowed either, I wasn't really referring to distribution of the patches, just…

You’re talking about the EULA, not the copyright license. The EULA can certainly claim you’re not allowed to do that, but it’s also unenforceable in most places so who cares?

I'm talking about neither the EULA nor the copyright license, but about copyright law, which doesn't allow modifications by default. Only a EULA or other license can then allow modifications.

OTOH, even the GPL is pretty much unenforceable these days, unless you are well funded enough to afford time consuming legal cases.

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

#670

Post by EdwardDiego »

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #629
EdwardDiego wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except fiat currencies have a value in the market based on the economies of the countries that issue them. I have yet to see a cryptocurrency that has a value in the market based on anything other than "a bigger fool might come along".

I guess you don't understand what value the seal of approval a dollar has - for that is what Bitcoin generates but without the backdoor devaluation and cronyism of private banking.

Sorry, that sentence doesn't make much sense as it is, could you please expand on it?
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