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Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

majorgeeks.com

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Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#71

Post by alkonaut »

eswat wrote: post #35

Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough, but I’m surprised this and the forced login for GeForce Experience didn’t make a bigger wave amongst gamers, who’ve historically been very vocal about questionable decisions that provide far more value to the business than to the gamers.

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 if programs do it without asking and I think all apps should have feature statistics telemetry to be able to cut (or make more discoverable) features no one uses.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#72

Post by alkonaut »

lukeschlather wrote: post #66
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'm playing a game, I alt-tab out, game crashes, and literally anything can end up in the framebuffer related to a crash.

So apps shouldn't send any dumps/buffers as part of crash reports. They are still useful.

Also: crash reports should be accepted individually and not part of "telemetry" (anonymous usage and hw/os stats).

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#73

Post by bumblebeard »

KirinDave wrote: post #25
throwaway2048 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are fooling yourself if you think technology can be separated from politics.

Personally I think that the HN response of, "We flag politics" is really just a blind for not discussing sensitive topics like racism, sexism, and human rights in a larger sense. But that won't stop me from trying to fairly apply the policy to the free software people who are utterly convinced that serving their agenda is a net good rather than a lifestyle choice.

Why isn't free software a net good?

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#74

Post by shostack »

alkonaut wrote: post #71
eswat wrote: post #35

Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough, but I’m surprised this and the forced login for GeForce Experience didn’t make a bigger wave amongst gamers, who’ve historically been very vocal about questionable decisions that provide far more value to the business than to the gamers.

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…

The problem is you'll never fully know what info they collect and send, and who might have access to it.

It is equivalent to installing spyware.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#75

Post by r1ch »

youdounderstand wrote: post #48

I'm surprised by the backlash against telemetry on HN. How else are you supposed to improve reliability of software used on tens of millions of devices with an ear infinite number of hardware and software permutations?

When such telemetry exposes the names of programs you are running and is sent unencrypted, it's a big deal. Coupled with very specific hardware information, this could easily be used to track TOR users for example.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#76

Post by throwaway2048 »

dogma1138 wrote: post #70
throwaway2048 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe opt-in rates are low because people dont want the data sent? Assuming they are wrong because it makes your job harder is a pretty self serving deduction.

People aren't bothered about security or privacy, they just cannot be bothered. Giving even the slightest incentive to send data brings those numbers up extensively even if what you get is meaningless. Basically humans need a reason to tick a box. This is why this is under GFE which gives you value added services.

>People aren't bothered about security or privacy, they just cannot be bothered.

Says who? You? Facebook? Microsoft? Google? You don't see the inherent conflict of benefiting from that position and declaring it, unilaterally, it to be so?

How many people do you think would be comfortable, and explicitly approve the kinds of "opt out" data collection that goes on, if you gave them the true extent of how that data can be/is used along with the impacts of it?

Frankly, fuck the attitude that you, or any other developer knows more than me, and decides that i "Just cannot be bothered", especially when its to their (often considerable) benefit.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#77

Post by shostack »

KirinDave wrote: post #20
userbinator wrote: post #7

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. These are GPU drivers. It's not at all unreasonable that there may be something sensitive shown on the screen when a crash occurs. It might not even be shown on the screen but still pr…

> 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 this at face value. They have not done so.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#78

Post by valarauca1 »

greydius wrote: post #13
squarefoot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw Shouldn't be a problem anymore under Linux as most distros today install Nouveau drivers by default. https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Nouveau has no CUDA support, unfortunately.

CUDA is proprietary to Nvidia.

CUDA only exists because Nvidia is attempting to pretend OpenCL, Vulkan, and DX12 don't exist [1]. These require hardware scheduling on the GPU to switch shaders. Rather then dedicated X amount of chip hardware to Y shader for Z ms.

It should be noted for GPGPU compute Nvidia is not the correct choice. AMD RX 480 has 5.8TFLOPS @$200 ($37/TFLOP) vs Nvidia GTX1080 8.9TFLOPS @$600 ($67/TFLOP). In reality you should be doing GPU programming in OpenCL so you are GPU agnostic. You can switch vendors or platforms seamlessly (in most cases if you avoid proprietary extensions) even target AMD64, ARM, and POWER8/9 hardware.

That being said I own a boat load of Nvidia stock because their marketing is excellent. Really marketing is all 80% of people pay attention too. CUDA has some great marketing around it. In reality CUDA is slower then OpenCL (on Nvidia's platforms even) and no easier to work in.

[1] https://postimg.org/image/vsnidk8p5/

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#79

Post by shostack »

youdounderstand wrote: post #48

I'm surprised by the backlash against telemetry on HN. How else are you supposed to improve reliability of software used on tens of millions of devices with an ear infinite number of hardware and software permutations?

By at least allowing the user to opt out.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#80

Post by throwaway2048 »

dogma1138 wrote: post #51
andromeduck wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real issue here though is it doesn't seem like they have an opt out option.

There is, don't install Geforce Experience, GFE has always sent some data to NVIDIA now they are also collecting driver telemetry. GFE requires a separate installation and for you to signup and login. This isn't a service required for you to get GPU drivers. The only thing you lose is NVIDIA's screen capture software and game optimization (and some deals sometimes). You can still use your card to the fullest without…

>This isn't a service required for you to get GPU drivers.

That is not true, beta drivers require the login. They are often needed for new games to run without crashing, or bad performance.

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