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

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601–610 of 693 posts

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

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm just gonna artificially raise price of this limited resource even though there already exists hardware specifically made for me, but after the next generation comes out I can re-sell this one to some sucker" If you don't see anything wrong with that then that's about it. I really hope US or China or someone is going to regulate cryptocurrencies to shit so cryto-bros can stop destroying the planet and normal peop…

You aren't entitled to cheaper video cards just because you don't like what other people are doing with them

Conversely miners aren't entitled to cheaper video cards just because they built a business around consumer hardware.

Companies seeking to maximize their revenue is very much the nature of the free market. It's their business, you don't get to tell them how to run it. You're a customer in a market, if you don't find the product acceptable then you can go elsewhere. There are competitors offering products as well, and as a whole this determines a market rate.

If your business is no longer profitable (or profitable enough) paying the market rate, then you go out of business. That is also how the market works. Many, many businesses would be far more profitable if they could force their suppliers to cut their revenue streams.

Miners have responded to the shift in the power dynamic by throwing a tantrum and attacking and blackmailing their suppliers. Bioshock nailed it: laissez-faire is great when you're the one on top, but as soon as someone else out-competes you, or exerts their own market leverage, it's an unfair and ridiculous imposition on your own right to profit, and it's time to shout and flip the game board.

This is exactly what you see with the whole "gamers aren't entitled to cheap cards" thing you said, that was great when miners had more market power than gamers, but everyone leaves off the whole "and miners aren't entitled to cheap cards either", which is equally true. Suppliers are taking note of that market power and moving to take a cut of the revenue for themselves. Customers are free to re-shuffle to new suppliers if they no longer find the terms acceptable. And that's how the free market works.

As always - businesses that are not agile enough to adapt, will "exit the market", and create room for newer, healthier businesses.

And remember, this has been status quo for a long time. If your business depended on CAD, it probably sucked when ATI and NVIDIA started releasing workstation products and artificially limiting CAD performance on gaming cards. The world moved on though.

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

#602
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads at least require an audience. Crypto mining abuse requires just the ability to execute anything. That’s why ads are like acne for the Internet, but crypto is a cancer.

I'd argue it's the opposite. Crypto is fairly easy to avoid as an individual - the only thing I can think of that crypto has "contaminated" is GPU prices. Otherwise, don't get involved and just watch and laugh at the dumpster fire from a safe distance. You don't have to get involved in crypto to participate in society. Advertising on the other hand is very hard to avoid, and even blocking the ads themselves doesn't i…

> may sell you out.

Even HR departments. Got a new job and am completely spammed constantly at my brand new work email address.

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

#604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm just gonna artificially raise price of this limited resource even though there already exists hardware specifically made for me, but after the next generation comes out I can re-sell this one to some sucker" If you don't see anything wrong with that then that's about it. I really hope US or China or someone is going to regulate cryptocurrencies to shit so cryto-bros can stop destroying the planet and normal peop…

I am probably not that informed on who does what artificially and intentionally, but I still don’t see a point in justifying gaming usage over crypto usage. As far as destroying the planet argument goes, gamers could equally be limited to using a specifically designed devices for optimal gaming and entertainment purposes. Apart from the ability to check the GPU health, GPU providers could easily implement some hardwa…

> As far as destroying the planet argument goes, gamers could equally be limited to using a specifically designed devices for optimal gaming and entertainment purposes.

gamers frequently are, you just described a console.

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

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not opting out of anything, nor am I leaving. Those "rules" form the backbone of the financial arm of total global surveillance. I oppose them on principle, as should everyone on this site. I want to see them either repealed or completely neutralized with subversive technology such as cryptocurrency. The only problem here is the fact that so much energy is being wasted on the failure that is bitcoin. I wouldn't m…

Only in the same sense that laws are "imposed on" criminals. You may not have personally agreed to it, but it's part of the legal framework our society rests on.

Criminals like murderers? Yeah, everyone agrees with that, it's not controversial. Total surveillance? Not everyone accepts this fundamental injustice. Their actions violate the principles countries like the USA were literally founded upon. As far as we're concerned, they're the criminals here and this technology is just self-defense against their continued abuse.

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

#606
post #379
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience nouveau was way better than the proprietary drivers, which would crash a lot, while nouveau was stable. This was long ago though, maybe nvidia are better now. I don't think you can distribute patches against proprietary source-available drivers, since modifying proprietary code is against copyright law.

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 creating them isn't allowed AFAIK.

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

#607

I doubt nvidia would have complied with their demands anyway, but the new demand "make all your code open source or else we'll release it ourselves" gives them absolutely no incentive to comply at all. If the choices are you can have your source out there but unlicensed so it's illegal for anyone else to use it, or you can choose to legally let anyone else use your source -- why would nvidia ever choose the latter? T…

That's a good point, although they are threatening to release slightly more than just the drivers ("the complete silicon, graphics, and computer chipset files"). But the legal vs. illegal access is definitely interesting and probably not something they took into account. I don't see, say, AMD stealing from "publicly stolen" technology, I can't imagine the insane lawsuit that would ensue. Maybe some Chinese company mi…

Think of all the security vulnerabilities and patent violations that would become apparent in case the Verilog is released too.

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

#608

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…

Devils advocate here, but crypto does disrupt a free sharing economy that's on the internet and part of the magic of it. Yet maybe there are benefits in terms of making previously economically inviable things viable. People making passion projects are great, but at the end of the day they are creating value for people that's almost never reciprocated in other ways and tokenizing things lets them capture that value or…

Putting away the scams, environmental concerns, and lack of regulation is a big caveat though. They are an inherent cost to the crypto space that currently lack an immediate resolution (to my knowledge).

How much "previously economically inviable things" are captured by NFTs and crypto anyways? I have not seen any potential usescases that outweigh even the inherent environmental cost of cryptocurrency.

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

#609
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh it’s not too bad on Linux as long as you use the official docker image that has cuda, cudnn, and tensorflow with matching versions. This also lets you use tf1, tf2, and PyTorch in separate containers without upgrading cudnn in lockstep. Larger projects that use several models inevitably require all three. If you install it yourself, you’re in for a world of hurt.

I don't understand how anyone can be okay with: "Here, run this piece of code. No don't bother trying to read, build or understand it yourself, we know you won't be able to do it, so we put it in a little mystery box over here that you can run on top of your existing operating system. Now please don't ask any questions and go away."

Well that's basically all we do isn't it? Every exe you run on windows, every apt package you get on linux, every docker container, or node module, etc. Just layers and layers of running black boxes that nobody but the original developer knows much about.

But even if you compile it yourself, what exactly are you gaining? Extra work for something you won't look into anyway? You'd think open source stuff would be more peer reviewed, but as a maintainer of a few open company repos it's surprising how much nobody actually cares and will just run whatever.

Most of the time it works fine because the average person isn't a malicious actor, but every so often something gets compromised and it's always discovered by pure chance.

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

#610
post #5

> So, NVIDIA, the choice is yours! Either: Officially make current and all future drivers for all cards open source, while keeping the Verilog and chipset trade secrets... well, secret OR Not make the drivers open source, making us release the entire silicon chip files so that everyone not only knows your driver's secrets, but also your most closely-guarded trade secrets for graphics and computer chipsets too! Intere…

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…

Printer Drivers, but those are not brand specific, take the cake here.
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