81–90 of 242 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMD are already doing sneaky things with their driver autoupdate on Windows, they put the checkbox below the "upgrade" button, prechecked and with a large spacing so it is likely you don't see it immediately and click "upgrade" before you realize it, and they also present the checkbox at least twice, rechecking it if you unchecked it previously. So I fear that after that move by Nvidia they'll feel empowered to push…
What was the checkbox for?
Good. Telemetry should have been in these video drivers for crash reporting for a decade. Would have helped a ton with various video game crashs and the low quality of video drivers.
The article tries to get you to download "autoruns.zip" from their site. That's suspicious. But it seems to be OK. The official Microsoft version is at [1] and the ZIP files compare equal. [1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.as...
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.
Rather: by requiring the user to opt in.
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.
I noticed the same thing. It's ridiculous. Geforce Experience doesn't do anything I care about except auto-update drivers. Why do I need to log in for that?
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.
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'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.
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…
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.
Any info ever collected by no-permissions-asked telemetry must be such that it doesn't matter who has the information or what they do with it. If it isn't information of that kind then of course a program should ask permission. But that in my view isn't "telemetry" then. If it collects anything even remotely user-identifying or personal then it's in my definition not telemetry and should never be done without permission (if at all).
If a program really is malicious, then it doesn't matter if it asks for permission because why would that wouldn't respect the users wish anyway?
My argument wasn't pro/against telemetry, it was that asking permission doesn't change anything. Permission isn't what tells malicious programs from others. A benign program doesn't do things that needs permission to begin with.
Do recent drivers always include the latter? How do I check for them? Are they kernel modules?
In my case, all the nvidia drivers I see loaded are:
$ lsmod | grep nv
nvidia_drm 20480 1
drm 294912 3 nvidia_drm
nvidia_uvm 704512 0
nvidia_modeset 770048 3 nvidia_drm
nvidia 11866112 42 nvidia_modeset,nvidia_uvm