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Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

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Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#221

Post by KirinDave »

shostack wrote: post #77
KirinDave wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think this is a case where we need to assume guilty until proven innocent. You see, there's no way for users to know what data is being collected and sent today, or what they might change and decide to collect tomorrow. What if government wants access to this data? What if some hacker gets access to the data or their methods of collecting it (MitM)? As such, they need to prove we can trust them before we accept thi…

> As such, they need to prove we can trust them before we accept this at face value. They have not done so.

This is ultimately a trust relationship with your vendor. There is nothing they can do but be trustworthy.

Don't say, "open sourcing." Open sourcing code doesn't assert much of anything about the binaries you have running. sourceless propagating binary behavior is 30 year old technology.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#222

Post by Karunamon »

blub wrote: post #202
dogma1138 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about missing the privacy discussion it's about the public at large not giving a flying duck about it, regardless of what you think. Pick a random person on the street and ask them, you need to understand that by enlarge simply by knowing about this site you are already part of a tiny subculture of of the general population, and most likely living in a walled garden as far as your social connections goes. Pe…

People can't be expected to understand all the subtle aspects of privacy, medicine, drugs, automobiles and many other things. That's why there are laws which by default protect those people from the maliciousness, greed or incompetence of companies. And why the US needs strong privacy laws. The fact that the masses don't understand something is irrelevant.

And what of the people that do "understand all the subtle aspects of privacy", and disagree with your conclusions?

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#223

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

slededit wrote: post #121
LinuxBender wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blocked their telemetry and not I can't even update my drivers. Not through windows update, nor through their installer. It hangs trying to talk back to them. No harm, no foul, probably time to give AMD cards a chance. Variety is the spice of life and the spice must flow.

On my last box I found the AMD drivers were injecting a DLL into almost every process - including the brand new program I was in the process of developing.

I've seen Nvidia drivers do that too. I think it's mostly done to let the user override graphics settings that are otherwise hardcoded into the application's API calls.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#224

Post by CaptSpify »

dogma1138 wrote: post #37
aluhut wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So would it hurt them in some way if they would ask first?

Yes and no, while opt-in is important for privacy and other concerns the problem is that virtually no one opts in.

Doesn't that seem to indicate that people don't want it then? That sounds like an even stronger reason to have it opt-in.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#225

Post by ionised »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #179
doubt_me wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its bigger than that. We are at a point where I would pay a monthly premium in order to keep my privacy and would rather have a bunch of free tiered alternatives that are all explicitly non-private. Because lets be honest with ourselves nobody but us really gives a shit about their privacy. And it is a billion dollar industry. Let people who do not care keep the free shit at an up front cost rather than all this runn…

Paying for email sounds weird to most people these days, but now that I do, I'd never have it any other way again.

Same here. Three separate, paid services. I'd never go back to something like GMail again.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#226

Post by ionised »

grzm wrote: post #180
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying for email sounds weird to most people these days, but now that I do, I'd never have it any other way again.

I'm days away from moving to fastmail. May I ask what service you're currently using? Are you happy with it?

I use;

https://kolabnow.com/

and

https://posteo.de/en

and use Postbox as my mail client. All great so far and only costs a few £'s a month. Probably less than lunch for a day or two.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#227

Post by mdaniel »

brink wrote: post #6

On a related note; I can't even use NVidia's "Geforce Experience" any more without logging in. Thanks for that, NVidia. Just what I wanted; a driver tool that forces me to log in.

Be aware there is a "Have feedback?" link in (I believe) the bottom right corner of the app, where you can have a better chance of them seeing your frustration than the comments here.

I don't know about others, but I approach that stuff with the attitude of "I can't expect change if I just swear at my monitor", but stop short of actually expecting change

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#228

Post by ChuckMcM »

white-flame wrote: post #204
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…

This isn't about just technical issue monitoring. Their privacy policies and such include sharing your personally identifying information (email, full name, etc) with 3rd parties & advertisers, and associating your random web browsing with your video card's account. Remember that it's not just games, but your web browser, media players and anything that might use hardware acceleration runs through these drivers, whic…

In my experience it is more nuanced than that, engineering will add a feature or capability and someone will come along and find a use for it that was unintended. At the search engine where I worked we came up with ways to inspect and adjust host rank and page rank such that we could knock out bad sites from the search results that were doing a good job gaming the system. But that biz dev folks also noted the same pieces could be combined to favor someone who advertised with us over someone who didn't.

The engineering feature is designed with pure intentions, keep crap out of the results stream, but the mechanism is amoral. If you're executive team wants to exploit it for more money so that the company does better financially, your options are limited as an engineer.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#229

Post by Grangar »

vsl wrote: post #185
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 :)

I wouldn't recommend that. AMD's software quality is horrible , and I'm saying that as an iMac user stuck with them on Windows. Whatever you think of nVidia, it's a breath of fresh air to see such polished auxiliary tools -- and yes, I think GeForce Experience is good ... why? Living with AMD crap for years. And if you think nVidia treats customers/users badly, just watch AMD's treatment of Apple hardware. They added…

The new Wattman software is supposedly a huge leap forward.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#230

Post by oblio »

ronjouch wrote: post #176
arthurfm wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a less ugly PowerShell version of your script that doesn't have any external dependencies and compares the version of the currently installed driver with the latest (non-beta) driver on NVIDIA's website. $URI = 'http://www.geforce.com/proxy?proxy_url=http%3A%2F%2Fgfwsl.geforce.com%2Fservices_toolkit%2Fservices%2Fcom%2Fnvidia%2Fservices%2FAjaxDriverService.php%3Ffunc%3DDriverManualLookup%26psid%3D101%26pfid%3D8…

Thanks. I hesitated reaching for PowerShell because, although it looks solid, I'm not familiar with it. Even at work, I was automating part of a Windows build last week, and used batch :-/ So I have a few questions to you or knowledgeable PS-passersby: 1. Any recommendations to get started with PowerShell? Good documentation, tooling, linters, useful packages? 2. Are there remaining cases where it's impossible or unr…

1. Try this: https://web.archive.org/web/20120103141402/http://powershell...

2. Not really. Worst case, you can batch & co.

3. Probably v2.

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