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Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

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Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#151

Post by baobrain »

michaelt wrote: post #124
random_rr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy moly, I thought that this post was a joke for sure - and then I checked out GeForce Experience. Uninstalled. Never to be reinstalled. AMD will be my next card. Thanks nVidia for letting me know what you think of me :)

My employer took took a shipment of fifteen Dell computers a few months ago - with ATI Radeon HD 8570 graphics cards (3 years old, with DP 1.2 and 4k support so not obsolete by any means, and certified for Ubuntu 14.04 [1]) Then Ubuntu 16.04 comes out, and guess what? No fglrx driver support any more [2] and users report the open source drivers use about a core and a half worth of CPU, slowing down their entire machi…

AMD has their AMDGPU-PRO [1] drivers that are available on 16.04

[1] https://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Radeon-G...

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#152

Post by nanch »

Send an email to info@nvidia.com to let them know that you'd like them to change their policies regarding opt-in vs opt-out default settings.

--

Here is my email:

Dear Nvidia,

  I have been a life-long supporter since I was in college (14 years). I have recommended your products to many friends and purchased more than 15 of your graphics cards for my own computers.  I build servers and run a cloud storage business. My friends and family look to me for advice on their own purchases. I am your target market - a technology leader that makes recommendations to others.

  I have been extremely satisfied with your product for a long time and would like to be able to recommend your "issue-free" products to my friends, family, and associates. I'm a big fan of Nvidia.
--

  Unfortunately, you have recently enabled telemetry reports (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884762), and I will be less willing to recommend your product, opting for an AMD solution, or on-board solutions.
--

  To resolve this issue, please:
1: Please use opt-in defaults instead of opt-out defaults for privacy-sensitive reports

2: Make a blog post publishing your public policy on prioritizing user privacy over other priorities.

--

On a more general note, privacy issues will be an increasingly important consideration for technology leaders before making recommendations. Microsoft made a mistake integrating privacy-invasive telemetry into Windows 10. Please don't make the same mistake. Nvidia needs leaders that will prioritize user privacy over other market concerns.

Thank you,

David

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#153

Post by drivebyops »

Fej wrote: post #142
rocqua wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, that doesn't allow use of shadowplay. There are some older versions of nvidea experience floating around that still work with shadowplay without the login.

Use OBS instead.

Shadow play has that record last X minutes feature that OBS doesn't I think

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#154

Post by alkonaut »

dsissitka wrote: post #105
alkonaut wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually just download and install the latest driver with regular intervals. I don't choose to install/use GeForce Experience, and now that it requires login I certainly won't. Why would I want to use this Exprience thing anyway? It's crapware, right? As for telemetry - as long as software only sends reasonable things (feature usage etc) and uses reasonable bandwidth, I'm completely fine. I honestly don't even mind…

> Why would I want to use this Exprience thing anyway? It's crapware, right? I use it for NVIDIA Share. It's my understanding that GPU-based alternatives can't compete because NVIDIA won't give them access to NVFBC and NVIFR. The creator of RivaTuner goes into more detail here: http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=4687310&postcount=61 http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=5294898&postcount=5

Is the share function that much better than the built in win10 one? I quite like that one but the video quality is so-so.

Might just try experience 2.x which is still around. I don't mind telemetry I do mind s mandatory Facebook login...

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#155

Post by michaelt »

baobrain wrote: post #151
michaelt wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My employer took took a shipment of fifteen Dell computers a few months ago - with ATI Radeon HD 8570 graphics cards (3 years old, with DP 1.2 and 4k support so not obsolete by any means, and certified for Ubuntu 14.04 [1]) Then Ubuntu 16.04 comes out, and guess what? No fglrx driver support any more [2] and users report the open source drivers use about a core and a half worth of CPU, slowing down their entire machi…

AMD has their AMDGPU-PRO [1] drivers that are available on 16.04 [1] https://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Radeon-G...

No mention of the Radeon HD 8570 on the list of supported cards. Unless you know better?

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#156

Post by stirner »

dogma1138 wrote: post #116
vetinari wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, Nvidia's proprietary drivers are excellent for features where the puck has been and not-so-excellent in features where the puck is going. See also Wayland support or switchable GPUs.

Been hearing about Wayland for a while wake me up when it's actually here. Also there is no problem with switchable GPU's which is specific to nVIDIA anymore the Optimus chip is no longer used (and haven't been for a while) since Intels Iris came out it powered a single generation of mobile GPUs and was a hack even on Windows.

> Also there is no problem with switchable GPU's which is specific to nVIDIA anymore the Optimus chip is no longer used

Do you have a source for this? In any case, just because some hardware has been recently phased out doesn't mean the manufacturer shouldn't be expected to support it. Not everyone has enough money to buy a new computer every year; I'm a student with an Optimus laptop and I know I won't be able to afford a replacement in the next year or two.

If NVIDIA can't be asked to fully support their hardware on Linux, the least they can do is release some documentation so the Nouveau devs don't need to grope in the dark.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#157

Post by mikepavone »

michaelt wrote: post #124
random_rr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy moly, I thought that this post was a joke for sure - and then I checked out GeForce Experience. Uninstalled. Never to be reinstalled. AMD will be my next card. Thanks nVidia for letting me know what you think of me :)

My employer took took a shipment of fifteen Dell computers a few months ago - with ATI Radeon HD 8570 graphics cards (3 years old, with DP 1.2 and 4k support so not obsolete by any means, and certified for Ubuntu 14.04 [1]) Then Ubuntu 16.04 comes out, and guess what? No fglrx driver support any more [2] and users report the open source drivers use about a core and a half worth of CPU, slowing down their entire machi…

It's weird that you're seeing such high CPU usage with the open source drivers. AMD has been directly supporting them for a while now. For most applications radeonsi (the open source driver for GCN arhictecture cards) performs within spitting distance of the proprietary driver and for some the performance is better. I suppose it's possible they are more CPU intensive generally, but the kind of slowdown you're seeing seems pretty excessive. What applications are you seeing this problem with?

Ubuntu 16.04 does ship with a pretty old version of Mesa (full major version behind, about to be 2 major verions as Mesa 13 is in the RC stage) which probably isn't helping matters. Unfortunately, while there are some PPAs that make it fairly easy to install a bleeding edge build, there's not really a convenient way to install the latest stable release.

For some context, the reason fglrx/Catalyst has not been updated is due to an in progress driver transition for AMD cards on Linux. Generally speaking, Linux video drivers are split into a kernel part and a user space part. For quite some time, AMD has maintained two completely separate driver stacks on Linux. For the user space side, this didn't represent a huge amount of duplication of effort as most of the code is shared with the OpenGL portion of their Windows driver, but for the kernel side it was a bunch of wasted effort. A while back, they started on a new open source kernel driver, called amdgpu, that could provide the necessary facilities for both their open source and proprietary driver efforts. The new proprietary driver (AMDGPU-Pro) targets this kernel module. Unfortunately, amdgpu does not have production-ready support for GCN 1.0 GPUs like the 8570. This will get fixed eventually, but that doesn't really help you now.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#158

Post by [deleted] »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #93

First, let me say that I think what they did was wrong and it should only be opt-in and clearly stated. That said, having managed fleets of machines that were nominally running the "same" software, getting updates from all of them is a really powerful debugging tool. Once you get above about 1,000 machines logs comparison of all the machines immediately surfaces software issues (happens on all machines), connectivity…

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#160

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Esau wrote: post #111
arkitaip wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the easy option to allow customers to participate in the program? Their software is already so buggy and bloated that a simple checkbox that ANONYMOUSLY sends telemetry would be trivial to implement.

This is something that, I hate to say, will probably take a law to fix. Companies in general have shown a resistance to understanding why this is a problem (even when well intentioned).

This. As long as consumers have no way of knowing whether or not their information is being transmitted, what information it is, and how it will be used, corporations will continue to do it at will. We need strong user data protection laws here in the United States that make it extremely clear what rights you are signing away any time you allow a service to collect personal data about you.
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