Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

Firstly for all the previous things they have done, for example their lack of driver support for free operating systems which is why Linus said this, their lack of Free Software drivers, their tight lockdown on proprietary technologies like PhysX that hurts portability and hurts non-Nvidia users and finally default collection of telemetry data is a highly unethical practice and the inclusion of the extra code to do it can only hurt stability and performance and increase driver size. Go ahead and downvote me to hell, I'm not bothered, go ahead and buy Nvidia chips, I will avoid Nvida like the plague till the day I die.

As much as I welcome the capitalistic response, I'm worried it won't be enough.

As much as I'd love true competition in the GPU/CPU space, it doesn't exist. AMD's cards simply cannot compete with Nvidia for GPGPU type scenarios, and even in its basic capacity, often have known heat/perf issues. Now that may be worth it for now to make a statement against the telemetry, but what if (less if and more when IMO) AMD then adds driver telemetry? And then intel?

These domains (Chip manufacture/GPU driver writing) are so advanced at this point that I don't see how competition could reasonably disrupt an incumbent over anything less than a samsung-grade failure (and even then probably not), and I'm concerned about the long-term wherein the producers realize this and through a combination of boiling the frog slowly and leaving consumers no other choices put themselves in the position to have a "pragmatic monopoly" of free reign over our machines. (I've always wondered what would happen from an antitrust sense, if it's "we're the only producer not because we WANT to but because we're the only ones who CAN")

We've certainly seen it happening with OSes, as well as some attempts from PC oems, I've always unfortunately thought it was just a matter of time until the more irreplaceable components got into the game too and I'd love some creative thoughts to actually stop the trend and not stand in its way, because I'm not sure we'll win that latter battle.

EDIT: as a child post points out, I completely forgot to mention drivers as well; as a strong argument to my "we don't have many options" thesis. AMD's linux support has been historically lacking next to NVIDIA which makes it a non starter in many cases.

So annoying, yes. I since uninstalled GeForce Experience and replaced update notifications (the only feature I was using) with this ugly batch script. Careful, it's ugly! Botched stackoverflow-oriented batch brogramming! But it works for me! Feel free to reuse and improve :)

    @ECHO OFF
    setLocal EnableDelayedExpansion

    rem nvup.bat, a quick & dirty driver downloader since GeForce Experience requires a login.
    rem In a folder with write permissions, drop the script and its two dependencies:
    rem  - jq: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
    rem  - curl: https://curl.haxx.se/
    rem For automation, just create a Scheduled Task that runs when you want it (I like on Resume).
    rem Reuse / modify / redistribute at will.

    rem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19131029/how-to-get-date-in-bat-file
    for /f "tokens=2 delims==" %%a in ('wmic OS Get localdatetime /value') do set "dt=%%a"
    set "YY=%dt:~2,2%" & set "YYYY=%dt:~0,4%" & set "MM=%dt:~4,2%" & set "DD=%dt:~6,2%"
    set "HH=%dt:~8,2%" & set "Min=%dt:~10,2%" & set "Sec=%dt:~12,2%"
    set "datestamp=%YYYY%%MM%%DD%" & set "timestamp=%HH%%Min%%Sec%"
    set "fullstamp=%YYYY%-%MM%-%DD%_%HH%-%Min%-%Sec%"
    echo lastCheck: "%fullstamp%" > lastCheck.log

    rem to get the update feed for your device/OS combo, go to http://www.geforce.com/drivers
    rem , pick your device/os, pop the "Network" tab of your devtools, start the driver search,
    rem and copy the url
    curl --silent -o rawNv.json "http://www.geforce.com/proxy?..."

    for /f "delims=" %%i in ('jq ".IDS[0].downloadInfo.DownloadURL" rawNv.json') do set lastUrl=%%i

    set /p installedUrl= installedUrl.txt
      pushd C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Downloads
      %~dp0\curl -O %lastUrl%
      popd
      rem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/774175/show-a-popup-message-box-from-a-windows-batch-file
      mshta "javascript:alert('New driver');close()"
    )

I recently just switch to AMD because I bought a FreeSync monitor and I've been meaning to upgrade my card anyway. Looks like I did it just in the nick of time.

> No, crash reporting is easily done with logs, preferably in some format you could redact any sensitive information from. This seems more like the "I will secretly phone home and not tell you about it or what I'm sending" kind of thing.

It's not terribly secret, now was it? It was... you know... immediately discovered and I'm pretty sure my driver changelog AND firewall asked about it.

> These are GPU drivers. It's not at all unreasonable that there may be something sensitive shown on the screen when a crash occurs.

Pardon me, could you please explain exactly what in the telemetry or common crash logs might reflect "sensitive" information? You seem to me like you're arguing from some sort of grand final consequence, "Well I assume there is sensitive data here!" And while perhaps that's not an unreasonable default policy to take, you might want to state it as such rather than implying (as you have) that it's been observed already.

In general, telemetry doesn't include bulk memory dumps. The technology for collection strongly discourages this, as the endpoints collecting standard telemetry need to run at the scale of your customer base. I'd be much more concerned about sharing log dumps if you've filled your framebuffers with confidential information.