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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

#221

Post by GrumpyNl »

deehouie wrote: post #71
modeless wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No single piece of software has wasted more of my time than Nvidia's drivers, mostly (though not exclusively) on Linux. They've rendered my OS unbootable so many times over the years. So many times I've spent whole days of my life troubleshooting, upgrading, downgrading, configuring, rebooting. Then often reinstalling the OS after their installers mess stuff up in ways that are impossible to even know until they pop…

I used to cringe whenever I see a prompt to upgrade driver. But it's getting better. Version 460.39 hasn't caused any pain so far.

Just look at the version number, 460.39.

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

#222

Post by eru »

selfportrait wrote: post #204
eru wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They prevent double spending attacks. That service is useful for some people. You can of course disagree. Just like you can disagree that building and fueling yachts for rich people is useful.

This entire chain of replies is skewed. Yes, real world mining is a serious offender, but that doesn’t exempt crypto mining. Have one look at one photograph of a crypto mining farm for one second and this will be obvious to anyone. On the point of double spend - collusion in bitcoin mining is very possible and decentralization is not as strong as claimed. There are tons of studies about this. https://cowles.yale.edu/…

> Yes, real world mining is a serious offender, but that doesn’t exempt crypto mining.

Agreed, they have essentially nothing in common apart from the name.

> Have one look at one photograph of a crypto mining farm for one second and this will be obvious to anyone.

Why? You can get pretty bad pictures of eg factory farming, too; still that doesn't mean people will stop eating factory farmed meat.

> On the point of double spend - collusion in bitcoin mining is very possible and decentralization is not as strong as claimed. There are tons of studies about this.

The pdf you linked says nothing about double spending.

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

#223

Post by pavlovskyi »

For a long time I lived thinking that I did something wrong working with nvidia drivers. Ubuntu installation comes with no problem every time I did it, but there was tremendous amount of issues which comes exact from installing nvidia drivers. It was so irritating and not intuitive that I always thought that this incosistency and issue generating flow is just matter of time. But it is still in game and installing CUDA Toolkit gave you that feeling like you are applying on junior software engineer to nvidia and it is a technical interview.

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

#224

Post by ggreg84 »

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…

From the Nouveau devs themselves: https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961

They claim that leaking anything would actually make their work significantly harder.

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

#225

Post by ggreg84 »

bouncycastle wrote: post #30

I'm not a big fan of limiting hardware to run only approved software. One day it's for limiting crypto mining, the next day it will be for limiting our ability to use strong encryption. It's a slippery slope.

> I'm not a big fan of limiting hardware to run only approved software. One day it's for limiting crypto mining, the next day it will be for limiting our ability to use strong encryption. It's a slippery slope.

I'd assume that developing extra features costs money. If a buyer doesn't need a feature, why should they have to pay for it?

For example, if a gamer does not need drivers for a CAD program, or crypto features, why should the gamer have to foot the bill for developing these features, and suffer the consequences of them (e.g. scarcity due to cryptominers buying all gaming cards) ?

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

#227

Post by simmerup »

Mindwipe wrote: post #211
feanaro wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think nVidia will want to see the release of all of its chip schematics? That's an interesting position, but I fail to see how that would be a good idea for them. Perhaps if they are hoping the hackers will be apprehended before Friday.

They won't want to, but I suspect they would prefer it to the actions demanded by the ransom. Nobody legitimate can do anything with the released information if the hackers leak it. It's a huge patent red flag. They could with the drivers open sourced.

I doubt China would have any qualms using the information

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

#228

Post by ProtoAES256 »

I absolutely hate Nvidia on my Ubuntu machine geared towards development. It's been about 4 years since I've entered the CUDA(and cudnn) scene for AI development.

You'd think I'd be a guru in the installation process by now but I still occasionally make my system unbootable for one reason or another with new releases, or the whole thing "just don't work" outright.

It is really, really frustrating since every solution is basically "try again or start anew, we don't have the source so can't help you much sorry".

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

#229

Post by charcircuit »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #16
hungryforcodes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just sell more GPUs. Nvidia makes more money. We get more and better GPUs. I'm not sure how this is bad.

So I take it you haven't tried to buy a 30-series GPU for gaming, then. It's impossible*, and that's because of mining*. * Yeah, yeah, I know, supply chain this and pandemic demand that, but it's really mining that's the culprit.

>It's impossible

There's plenty listed on sites like ebay or rakuten. It's definitely possible to buy. Else you can go buy it when it gets restocked somewhere else or go buy it at a physical store.

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

#230

Post by simmerup »

blihp wrote: post #133
oofabz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was an attempt to decrease demand for the cards, thereby reducing price. The simplest market solution to high demand and inadequate supply would be to raise the price of the cards. This would maximize short-term profits but Nvidia felt it was not the right strategic move. Why not? Here are some guesses: - pricing gamers out of the GPU market would damage Nvidia's historical market - video games - pricing AI users…

That argument falls apart when you realize that LHR didn't cripple nVidia's cards, it merely reduced their mining performance to being just a bit stronger (but still stronger) than AMD. Had they really wanted to kill miner interest in their cards they would have reduced hashing performance by something like 90% with LHR. I think all they were ever really trying to do was decrease the relative desirability of nVidia c…

So if they ever have a bad quarter increase the LHR over night and force crypto miners to buy the ‘new’ cards to stay competitive
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