17 ms·

Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

409 points by schwarze_pest 10y ago

bhouston 10y ago
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.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Yep, atm NVIDIA and AMD can only get display driver crash data directly from Microsoft. From what I've been told they not only have to pay for it, but while the data has statistical significance it has very low technical value on it's own. So as far as things go now what happens is, new game is released, players with card X and configuration Y N P and Z complain about driver crashes over reddit/forums, NVIDIA/AMD picks up on it and then starts to try to figure what the hell is going on. Usually some initial mitigating actions would be released within a few days, and within a week to a month a full driver update will be released. While this isn't the end of the world, it's annoying that you have issues that prevent you from enjoying a game that you paid 60$ for on a system that you likely paid at least 1000$ if not 3-4 times that.
  - matt_wulfeck 10y ago
    Fair enough, allow people to click "send to nvidia" upon an actual crash, and allow a permanent opt-out. Isn't this the way companies have been handling crash reports since... forever?
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      I agree that there should be an opt-out option (other than not installing GFE, tho considering that GFE has always phoned home I don't know if that is that important), yes in an ideal world people should opt-in, the problem is that almost no one does. Anyone who ever worked on a crash report system knows that opt-in rates are below 10% even for corporate clients. Heck if you are lucky you get single digit % figures on "send this report" even if the checkbox is ticked by default, the vast majority of people just hit cancel. The stats are actually pretty darn interesting, especially for image quality vs fps I had a chance to speak to a few reps from NVIDIA once and they told me that as much as PC players bitch and moan about 60fps vsync the vast majority of them would push settings at the expense of smooth(er) framerates even if they have no to very little effect on image quality.
      - throwaway2048 10y ago
        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.
        dogma1138 10y ago
        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.
        throwaway2048 10y ago
        >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.
        Karunamon 10y ago
        When using "people" in aggregate, this is a completely correct statement . It's why, for example, HN throws a fit[1] the moment a developer goes so far as to add anonymous google analytics to a package manager [2] even when that data couldn't possibly be used to harm them or track them in any way. If you make $thing opt in, most people will not do $thing, regardless of what $thing is. Defaults matter. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11566720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11566720 [2]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.md https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....
  - aluhut 10y ago
    So would it hurt them in some way if they would ask first?
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      Yes and no, while opt-in is important for privacy and other concerns the problem is that virtually no one opts in.
      - andromeduck 10y ago
        Real issue here though is it doesn't seem like they have an opt out option.
        dogma1138 10y ago
        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 it. Source: I have the latest drivers and don't have GFE, the telemetry software is part of the update core which is currently installed with GFE.
        throwaway2048 10y ago
        >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.
        dogma1138 10y ago
        Beta drivers can also be downloaded from the geforce.com website.
        aluhut 10y ago
- userbinator 10y ago
  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 present in GPU memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873059 I would not be surprised if the telemetry included some parts of GPU state which could contain sensitive data.
  - KirinDave 10y ago
    > 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 not at all unreasonable that there may be something sensitive shown on the screen when a crash occurs. Pardon me, could you please explain exactly what in the telemetry or common crash logs might reflect "sensitive" information? You seem to me like you're arguing from some sort of grand final consequence, "Well I assume there is sensitive data here!" And while perhaps that's not an unreasonable default policy to take, you might want to state it as such rather than implying (as you have) that it's been observed already. In general, telemetry doesn't include bulk memory dumps. The technology for collection strongly discourages this, as the endpoints collecting standard telemetry need to run at the scale of your customer base. I'd be much more concerned about sharing log dumps if you've filled your framebuffers with confidential information.
    - lukeschlather 10y ago
      I'm playing a game, I alt-tab out, game crashes, and literally anything can end up in the framebuffer related to a crash.
      - 10y ago
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  they are sending way more than crash data. Just like most of the people that claim "telemetry" is only to fix bugs... https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/5bcppp/nvidia_has_added_telemetry_to_their_windows/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/5bcppp/nvidia...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- yuhong 10y ago
  On crash reporting, I just submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883823 about a privacy-related feature invented in 2011.
bnmillar 10y ago
In the words of Linus, "Nvidia, Fuck You"
- EpicEng 10y ago
  Why, exactly?
  - squarefoot 10y ago
    Some background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw 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/ https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/
    - greydius 10y ago
      Nouveau has no CUDA support, unfortunately.
      - zanny 10y ago
        It can't, Nouveau is not developed by Nvidia.
      - valarauca1 10y ago
        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/ https://postimg.org/image/vsnidk8p5/
brink 10y ago
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.
- LinuxBender 10y ago
  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.
  - existencebox 10y ago
    As much as I welcome the capitalistic response, I'm worried it won't be enough. As much as I'd love true competition in the GPU/CPU space, it doesn't exist. AMD's cards simply cannot compete with Nvidia for GPGPU type scenarios, and even in its basic capacity, often have known heat/perf issues. Now that may be worth it for now to make a statement against the telemetry, but what if (less if and more when IMO) AMD then adds driver telemetry? And then intel? These domains (Chip manufacture/GPU driver writing) are so advanced at this point that I don't see how competition could reasonably disrupt an incumbent over anything less than a samsung-grade failure (and even then probably not), and I'm concerned about the long-term wherein the producers realize this and through a combination of boiling the frog slowly and leaving consumers no other choices put themselves in the position to have a "pragmatic monopoly" of free reign over our machines. (I've always wondered what would happen from an antitrust sense, if it's "we're the only producer not because we WANT to but because we're the only ones who CAN") We've certainly seen it happening with OSes, as well as some attempts from PC oems, I've always unfortunately thought it was just a matter of time until the more irreplaceable components got into the game too and I'd love some creative thoughts to actually stop the trend and not stand in its way, because I'm not sure we'll win that latter battle. EDIT: as a child post points out, I completely forgot to mention drivers as well; as a strong argument to my "we don't have many options" thesis. AMD's linux support has been historically lacking next to NVIDIA which makes it a non starter in many cases.
isaac_is_goat 10y ago
I recently just switch to AMD because I bought a FreeSync monitor and I've been meaning to upgrade my card anyway. Looks like I did it just in the nick of time.
deadcast 10y ago
I just switched to a geforce 8400gs using the nouveau drivers on GNU/Linux. I'm not big into graphically intense applications and I don't have to worry about my graphics card waking up and "phoning home." :)
eswat 10y ago
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.
- nobodyshere 10y ago
  Well, I simply uninstalled the whole thing. Will download drivers manually now. Same for razer synapse. Anything that requires me to have an account for no obvious reason has no place on my system.
  - webkike 10y ago
    Likewise. I originally downloaded GeForce experience when I was installing my drivers. When I noticed login was required I uninstalled and downloaded the drivers manually.
    - frik 10y ago
      Probably many experienced user do that. Same with Windows since XP. Yet the companies don't learn and use such biased telemetry data for statistics and decide based on them. I wonder if Office and Windows UI got worse and worse, because of reading to much into telemetry data? The WindowsVista devs wrre pretty open in their official blog about it back then. And remember how it tanked, and that was just a small thing compared to the big failure of Win8/10 UI. Such companies need a CEO or CTO who tests their products themself like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did, it worked fine as long the were the leader.
      - maksimum 10y ago
        A sample size of 1-10 C's isn't necessarily better than a sample size of 100ks of users who aren't intimately interested in their privacy. I think C's don't have the time to think about the multitude of possible workflows in their apps. On the other hand developers are so intimately familiar with their apps that they have a hard time "not knowing" what to do.
frik 10y ago
Can it be avoided using the "advanced" option in the setup wizard and deselect everything but the graphics driver (,the physics engine and the sound driver)?
arcanus 10y ago
Please AMD make competitive products to keep Intel and nvidia honest!
- zanny 10y ago
  The 480 is really competitive right now, especially when you can get one for ~$150 with discounts on sale in the last couple weeks. Hopefully Zen can complete at least at the $200 price point with Intel.
youdounderstand 10y ago
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?
- monochromatic 10y ago
  And yet, people do.
- r1ch 10y ago
  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.
  - andromeduck 10y ago
    Doubt it's tracking all applications. Probably only GPU heavy ones like games, CAD and creative tools like Photoshop and Premiere.
    - voltagex_ 10y ago
      Except to make that kind of statement you need to back it up with evidence. From one of the other articles it looks like they now use TLS so you'll need your own MITM cert and Wireshark.
- shostack 10y ago
  By at least allowing the user to opt out.
  - wolfgke 10y ago
    > By at least allowing the user to opt out. Rather: by requiring the user to opt in.
elihu 10y ago
Any idea if the Linux drivers do this as well?
- Zelmor 10y ago
  Geforce experience is not available for linux.
Animats 10y ago
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.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.as...
- Bjartr 10y ago
  If you know the sysinternals tool you want, you can grab it directly from live.sysinternals.com, which is an official microsoft site. e.g. http://live.sysinternals.com/autoruns.exe http://live.sysinternals.com/autoruns.exe
nopcode 10y ago
In NVIDIA's defense... this is all optional. You can still install the drivers with control panel without any telemetry or "GeForce Experience".
hobarrera 10y ago
What's "GeForce Experience", "Wireless Controller" and "ShadowPlay services"? 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
- IshKebab 10y ago
  I thought it was pretty obvious it is about the Windows drivers.
- imtringued 10y ago
  GeForce Experience is a seperate application that automatically updates the drivers for you. ShadowPlay is their hardware accelerated video capture software. They are optional.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
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 issues (machines in a certain area), bad machines (unique problem signature), and environmental issues (time of day correlation with other things like power/temp/humidity/etc). And that gives you a bit more courage to release things early because you'll see problems faster and can fix them. So with a typical roll-out of 10% of the population followed by an additional 15% followed by the rest, you can catch a lot of errors and 75% of your population sees a really good experience (and in web services where 66% of the populations the minimum requirement for delivering rated service you can often get close to 100% uptime). Does that justify their action? No. But since you really don't need everybody to participate to get the benefit I could see a path where you opt in for early access to drivers which requires the telmetry, and people who are ok waiting for the driver to be clean in the 'canary' population get a driver without telemetry.
- arkitaip 10y ago
  Isn't the easy option to allow customers to participate in the program? Their software is already so buggy and bloated that a simple checkbox that ANONYMOUSLY sends telemetry would be trivial to implement.
  - Esau 10y ago
    This is something that, I hate to say, will probably take a law to fix. Companies in general have shown a resistance to understanding why this is a problem (even when well intentioned).
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      This. As long as consumers have no way of knowing whether or not their information is being transmitted, what information it is, and how it will be used, corporations will continue to do it at will. We need strong user data protection laws here in the United States that make it extremely clear what rights you are signing away any time you allow a service to collect personal data about you.
shmerl 10y ago
As a long time Nvidia user, I grew tired of Nvidia not releasing open drivers. At the same time, amdgpu + radeonsi + radv are constantly improving, so my next GPU is going to be AMD Vega.
cturner 10y ago
Imagine that five years from now, RISC-V or POWER8 have become established as free core-CPU platforms. Is there anything equivalent coming through in the GPU space?
- altstar 10y ago
  Hopefully POWER9 by then.
srj 10y ago
I used to just use the Windows "Update driver" dialog to manually find nvlddmkm.sys and install it that way to avoid the bloat. I haven't used Windows in a while but it may still be possible.
robohamburger 10y ago
It would be good to know if this is the geforce experience of the actual driver, and what exactly its doing. The article seems to be light on details.
eveningcoffee 10y ago
This behaviour is not acceptable.
andybak 10y ago
I'm not bothered about the privacy so much as the bloat (or rather - I trust that those more vigilant than me will warn me if the privacy issues are more than theoretical - lazy I know). The bloat is endemic to hardware companies. Is there some law of nature that says if you primarily build peripherals then you write terrible software?
proactivesvcs 10y ago
If I find any software defaulting to opt me in, without asking, it gets turned off and stays off. If it asks, I almost always permit it. When I have customers ask me about the same (when prompted by their software) they tend to agree with my thinking. There is an exception though - since Windows 10's enforced telemetry, I have turned off all of the telemetry for all of their software across the board. Until they start to conduct themselves respectably again, they can do without my drop in their ocean.
- floopidydoopidy 10y ago
  Go a step further and abandon their platform. Don't financially support their behavior. Convince your clients to do the same.
nanch 10y ago
Send an email to info@nvidia.com to let them know that you'd like them to change their policies regarding opt-in vs opt-out default settings. -- Here is my email: Dear Nvidia, I have been a life-long supporter since I was in college (14 years). I have recommended your products to many friends and purchased more than 15 of your graphics cards for my own computers. I build servers and run a cloud storage business. My friends and family look to me for advice on their own purchases. I am your target market - a technology leader that makes recommendations to others. I have been extremely satisfied with your product for a long time and would like to be able to recommend your "issue-free" products to my friends, family, and associates. I'm a big fan of Nvidia. -- Unfortunately, you have recently enabled telemetry reports (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884762), and I will be less willing to recommend your product, opting for an AMD solution, or on-board solutions. -- To resolve this issue, please: 1: Please use opt-in defaults instead of opt-out defaults for privacy-sensitive reports 2: Make a blog post publishing your public policy on prioritizing user privacy over other priorities. -- On a more general note, privacy issues will be an increasingly important consideration for technology leaders before making recommendations. Microsoft made a mistake integrating privacy-invasive telemetry into Windows 10. Please don't make the same mistake. Nvidia needs leaders that will prioritize user privacy over other market concerns. Thank you, David
- jhasse 10y ago
  How about buying AMD gfx cards instead?
JBiserkov 10y ago
Great article: highlights a problem, shows a solution. Autoruns is a very useful program.
awinter-py 10y ago
Even if we outlaw phone-home for information-gathering, automatic updates have to upload information about your architecture in order to download binaries. I don't think anybody is suggesting at this point we ditch automatic updates -- the consensus seems to be they fix more problems than they cause. So this is going to remain a problem.
RatherFunky 10y ago
Just to clarify, for anyone in doubt, this is windows os problem, only. And they did it, I think, for games for their tablet thingy. However there is much bigger issue of actual win 10 sending off telemetry at every $%^&ing restart,at least.
deviate_X 10y ago
What we actually need is good _independant_ firewall vendors. It is not enough to focus on the telemetry giant corporations like NVIDIA or Microsoft while forgetting about all the P2P software being installed by game's vendors and "telemetry" of software smaller vendors. On big computers/pcs the default mode makes the user give up too much control _forever_ once the software its has been installed. Most software only need to be doing anything when your actually using it. What we need is not opt-in checkboxes from vendors, what we need is the operating-system level software to be better -> where our explicit permission is needed to "allow" some kind of activity like transmitting over the network or detecting my location.
cheiVia0 10y ago
Ever since AMD put in the effort into open source Linux drivers, I've been only buying Radeon GPUs. This is a reminder of why I don't want to rely on proprietary drivers.

409 points by schwarze_pest 10y ago

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.

dogma1138 10y ago
Yep, atm NVIDIA and AMD can only get display driver crash data directly from Microsoft. From what I've been told they not only have to pay for it, but while the data has statistical significance it has very low technical value on it's own. So as far as things go now what happens is, new game is released, players with card X and configuration Y N P and Z complain about driver crashes over reddit/forums, NVIDIA/AMD picks up on it and then starts to try to figure what the hell is going on. Usually some initial mitigating actions would be released within a few days, and within a week to a month a full driver update will be released. While this isn't the end of the world, it's annoying that you have issues that prevent you from enjoying a game that you paid 60$ for on a system that you likely paid at least 1000$ if not 3-4 times that.
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago
  Fair enough, allow people to click "send to nvidia" upon an actual crash, and allow a permanent opt-out. Isn't this the way companies have been handling crash reports since... forever?
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    I agree that there should be an opt-out option (other than not installing GFE, tho considering that GFE has always phoned home I don't know if that is that important), yes in an ideal world people should opt-in, the problem is that almost no one does. Anyone who ever worked on a crash report system knows that opt-in rates are below 10% even for corporate clients. Heck if you are lucky you get single digit % figures on "send this report" even if the checkbox is ticked by default, the vast majority of people just hit cancel. The stats are actually pretty darn interesting, especially for image quality vs fps I had a chance to speak to a few reps from NVIDIA once and they told me that as much as PC players bitch and moan about 60fps vsync the vast majority of them would push settings at the expense of smooth(er) framerates even if they have no to very little effect on image quality.
    - throwaway2048 10y ago
      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.
      - dogma1138 10y ago
        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.
        throwaway2048 10y ago
        >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.
        Karunamon 10y ago
        When using "people" in aggregate, this is a completely correct statement . It's why, for example, HN throws a fit[1] the moment a developer goes so far as to add anonymous google analytics to a package manager [2] even when that data couldn't possibly be used to harm them or track them in any way. If you make $thing opt in, most people will not do $thing, regardless of what $thing is. Defaults matter. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11566720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11566720 [2]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.md https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....
- aluhut 10y ago
  So would it hurt them in some way if they would ask first?
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Yes and no, while opt-in is important for privacy and other concerns the problem is that virtually no one opts in.
    - andromeduck 10y ago
      Real issue here though is it doesn't seem like they have an opt out option.
      - dogma1138 10y ago
        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 it. Source: I have the latest drivers and don't have GFE, the telemetry software is part of the update core which is currently installed with GFE.
        throwaway2048 10y ago
        >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.
        dogma1138 10y ago
        Beta drivers can also be downloaded from the geforce.com website.
        aluhut 10y ago
userbinator 10y ago
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 present in GPU memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873059 I would not be surprised if the telemetry included some parts of GPU state which could contain sensitive data.
- KirinDave 10y ago
  > 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 not at all unreasonable that there may be something sensitive shown on the screen when a crash occurs. Pardon me, could you please explain exactly what in the telemetry or common crash logs might reflect "sensitive" information? You seem to me like you're arguing from some sort of grand final consequence, "Well I assume there is sensitive data here!" And while perhaps that's not an unreasonable default policy to take, you might want to state it as such rather than implying (as you have) that it's been observed already. In general, telemetry doesn't include bulk memory dumps. The technology for collection strongly discourages this, as the endpoints collecting standard telemetry need to run at the scale of your customer base. I'd be much more concerned about sharing log dumps if you've filled your framebuffers with confidential information.
  - lukeschlather 10y ago
    I'm playing a game, I alt-tab out, game crashes, and literally anything can end up in the framebuffer related to a crash.
    - 10y ago
throwaway2048 10y ago
they are sending way more than crash data. Just like most of the people that claim "telemetry" is only to fix bugs... https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/5bcppp/nvidia_has_added_telemetry_to_their_windows/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/5bcppp/nvidia...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
yuhong 10y ago
On crash reporting, I just submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883823 about a privacy-related feature invented in 2011.

bnmillar 10y ago

In the words of Linus, "Nvidia, Fuck You"

EpicEng 10y ago
Why, exactly?
- squarefoot 10y ago
  Some background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw 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/ https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/
  - greydius 10y ago
    Nouveau has no CUDA support, unfortunately.
    - zanny 10y ago
      It can't, Nouveau is not developed by Nvidia.
    - valarauca1 10y ago
      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/ https://postimg.org/image/vsnidk8p5/

brink 10y ago

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.

LinuxBender 10y ago
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.
- existencebox 10y ago
  As much as I welcome the capitalistic response, I'm worried it won't be enough. As much as I'd love true competition in the GPU/CPU space, it doesn't exist. AMD's cards simply cannot compete with Nvidia for GPGPU type scenarios, and even in its basic capacity, often have known heat/perf issues. Now that may be worth it for now to make a statement against the telemetry, but what if (less if and more when IMO) AMD then adds driver telemetry? And then intel? These domains (Chip manufacture/GPU driver writing) are so advanced at this point that I don't see how competition could reasonably disrupt an incumbent over anything less than a samsung-grade failure (and even then probably not), and I'm concerned about the long-term wherein the producers realize this and through a combination of boiling the frog slowly and leaving consumers no other choices put themselves in the position to have a "pragmatic monopoly" of free reign over our machines. (I've always wondered what would happen from an antitrust sense, if it's "we're the only producer not because we WANT to but because we're the only ones who CAN") We've certainly seen it happening with OSes, as well as some attempts from PC oems, I've always unfortunately thought it was just a matter of time until the more irreplaceable components got into the game too and I'd love some creative thoughts to actually stop the trend and not stand in its way, because I'm not sure we'll win that latter battle. EDIT: as a child post points out, I completely forgot to mention drivers as well; as a strong argument to my "we don't have many options" thesis. AMD's linux support has been historically lacking next to NVIDIA which makes it a non starter in many cases.

isaac_is_goat 10y ago

I recently just switch to AMD because I bought a FreeSync monitor and I've been meaning to upgrade my card anyway. Looks like I did it just in the nick of time.

deadcast 10y ago

I just switched to a geforce 8400gs using the nouveau drivers on GNU/Linux. I'm not big into graphically intense applications and I don't have to worry about my graphics card waking up and "phoning home." :)

eswat 10y ago

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.

nobodyshere 10y ago
Well, I simply uninstalled the whole thing. Will download drivers manually now. Same for razer synapse. Anything that requires me to have an account for no obvious reason has no place on my system.
- webkike 10y ago
  Likewise. I originally downloaded GeForce experience when I was installing my drivers. When I noticed login was required I uninstalled and downloaded the drivers manually.
  - frik 10y ago
    Probably many experienced user do that. Same with Windows since XP. Yet the companies don't learn and use such biased telemetry data for statistics and decide based on them. I wonder if Office and Windows UI got worse and worse, because of reading to much into telemetry data? The WindowsVista devs wrre pretty open in their official blog about it back then. And remember how it tanked, and that was just a small thing compared to the big failure of Win8/10 UI. Such companies need a CEO or CTO who tests their products themself like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did, it worked fine as long the were the leader.
    - maksimum 10y ago
      A sample size of 1-10 C's isn't necessarily better than a sample size of 100ks of users who aren't intimately interested in their privacy. I think C's don't have the time to think about the multitude of possible workflows in their apps. On the other hand developers are so intimately familiar with their apps that they have a hard time "not knowing" what to do.

frik 10y ago

Can it be avoided using the "advanced" option in the setup wizard and deselect everything but the graphics driver (,the physics engine and the sound driver)?

arcanus 10y ago

Please AMD make competitive products to keep Intel and nvidia honest!

zanny 10y ago
The 480 is really competitive right now, especially when you can get one for ~$150 with discounts on sale in the last couple weeks. Hopefully Zen can complete at least at the $200 price point with Intel.

youdounderstand 10y ago

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?

monochromatic 10y ago
And yet, people do.
r1ch 10y ago
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.
- andromeduck 10y ago
  Doubt it's tracking all applications. Probably only GPU heavy ones like games, CAD and creative tools like Photoshop and Premiere.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    Except to make that kind of statement you need to back it up with evidence. From one of the other articles it looks like they now use TLS so you'll need your own MITM cert and Wireshark.
shostack 10y ago
By at least allowing the user to opt out.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > By at least allowing the user to opt out. Rather: by requiring the user to opt in.

elihu 10y ago

Any idea if the Linux drivers do this as well?

Zelmor 10y ago
Geforce experience is not available for linux.

Animats 10y ago

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.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.as...

Bjartr 10y ago
If you know the sysinternals tool you want, you can grab it directly from live.sysinternals.com, which is an official microsoft site. e.g. http://live.sysinternals.com/autoruns.exe http://live.sysinternals.com/autoruns.exe

nopcode 10y ago

In NVIDIA's defense... this is all optional. You can still install the drivers with control panel without any telemetry or "GeForce Experience".

hobarrera 10y ago

What's "GeForce Experience", "Wireless Controller" and "ShadowPlay services"? 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

IshKebab 10y ago
I thought it was pretty obvious it is about the Windows drivers.
imtringued 10y ago
GeForce Experience is a seperate application that automatically updates the drivers for you. ShadowPlay is their hardware accelerated video capture software. They are optional.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

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 issues (machines in a certain area), bad machines (unique problem signature), and environmental issues (time of day correlation with other things like power/temp/humidity/etc). And that gives you a bit more courage to release things early because you'll see problems faster and can fix them. So with a typical roll-out of 10% of the population followed by an additional 15% followed by the rest, you can catch a lot of errors and 75% of your population sees a really good experience (and in web services where 66% of the populations the minimum requirement for delivering rated service you can often get close to 100% uptime). Does that justify their action? No. But since you really don't need everybody to participate to get the benefit I could see a path where you opt in for early access to drivers which requires the telmetry, and people who are ok waiting for the driver to be clean in the 'canary' population get a driver without telemetry.

arkitaip 10y ago
Isn't the easy option to allow customers to participate in the program? Their software is already so buggy and bloated that a simple checkbox that ANONYMOUSLY sends telemetry would be trivial to implement.
- Esau 10y ago
  This is something that, I hate to say, will probably take a law to fix. Companies in general have shown a resistance to understanding why this is a problem (even when well intentioned).
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    This. As long as consumers have no way of knowing whether or not their information is being transmitted, what information it is, and how it will be used, corporations will continue to do it at will. We need strong user data protection laws here in the United States that make it extremely clear what rights you are signing away any time you allow a service to collect personal data about you.

shmerl 10y ago

As a long time Nvidia user, I grew tired of Nvidia not releasing open drivers. At the same time, amdgpu + radeonsi + radv are constantly improving, so my next GPU is going to be AMD Vega.

cturner 10y ago

Imagine that five years from now, RISC-V or POWER8 have become established as free core-CPU platforms. Is there anything equivalent coming through in the GPU space?

altstar 10y ago
Hopefully POWER9 by then.

srj 10y ago

I used to just use the Windows "Update driver" dialog to manually find nvlddmkm.sys and install it that way to avoid the bloat. I haven't used Windows in a while but it may still be possible.

robohamburger 10y ago

It would be good to know if this is the geforce experience of the actual driver, and what exactly its doing. The article seems to be light on details.

eveningcoffee 10y ago

This behaviour is not acceptable.

andybak 10y ago

I'm not bothered about the privacy so much as the bloat (or rather - I trust that those more vigilant than me will warn me if the privacy issues are more than theoretical - lazy I know). The bloat is endemic to hardware companies. Is there some law of nature that says if you primarily build peripherals then you write terrible software?

proactivesvcs 10y ago

If I find any software defaulting to opt me in, without asking, it gets turned off and stays off. If it asks, I almost always permit it. When I have customers ask me about the same (when prompted by their software) they tend to agree with my thinking. There is an exception though - since Windows 10's enforced telemetry, I have turned off all of the telemetry for all of their software across the board. Until they start to conduct themselves respectably again, they can do without my drop in their ocean.

floopidydoopidy 10y ago
Go a step further and abandon their platform. Don't financially support their behavior. Convince your clients to do the same.

nanch 10y ago

Send an email to info@nvidia.com to let them know that you'd like them to change their policies regarding opt-in vs opt-out default settings. -- Here is my email: Dear Nvidia, I have been a life-long supporter since I was in college (14 years). I have recommended your products to many friends and purchased more than 15 of your graphics cards for my own computers. I build servers and run a cloud storage business. My friends and family look to me for advice on their own purchases. I am your target market - a technology leader that makes recommendations to others. I have been extremely satisfied with your product for a long time and would like to be able to recommend your "issue-free" products to my friends, family, and associates. I'm a big fan of Nvidia. -- Unfortunately, you have recently enabled telemetry reports (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884762), and I will be less willing to recommend your product, opting for an AMD solution, or on-board solutions. -- To resolve this issue, please: 1: Please use opt-in defaults instead of opt-out defaults for privacy-sensitive reports 2: Make a blog post publishing your public policy on prioritizing user privacy over other priorities. -- On a more general note, privacy issues will be an increasingly important consideration for technology leaders before making recommendations. Microsoft made a mistake integrating privacy-invasive telemetry into Windows 10. Please don't make the same mistake. Nvidia needs leaders that will prioritize user privacy over other market concerns. Thank you, David

jhasse 10y ago
How about buying AMD gfx cards instead?

JBiserkov 10y ago

Great article: highlights a problem, shows a solution. Autoruns is a very useful program.

awinter-py 10y ago

Even if we outlaw phone-home for information-gathering, automatic updates have to upload information about your architecture in order to download binaries. I don't think anybody is suggesting at this point we ditch automatic updates -- the consensus seems to be they fix more problems than they cause. So this is going to remain a problem.

RatherFunky 10y ago

Just to clarify, for anyone in doubt, this is windows os problem, only. And they did it, I think, for games for their tablet thingy. However there is much bigger issue of actual win 10 sending off telemetry at every $%^&ing restart,at least.

deviate_X 10y ago

What we actually need is good _independant_ firewall vendors. It is not enough to focus on the telemetry giant corporations like NVIDIA or Microsoft while forgetting about all the P2P software being installed by game's vendors and "telemetry" of software smaller vendors. On big computers/pcs the default mode makes the user give up too much control _forever_ once the software its has been installed. Most software only need to be doing anything when your actually using it. What we need is not opt-in checkboxes from vendors, what we need is the operating-system level software to be better -> where our explicit permission is needed to "allow" some kind of activity like transmitting over the network or detecting my location.

cheiVia0 10y ago

Ever since AMD put in the effort into open source Linux drivers, I've been only buying Radeon GPUs. This is a reminder of why I don't want to rely on proprietary drivers.