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Comment by ccmcarey | Hacker News Reader

There's also the fact that a few days ago Nvidia released a signed driver that disabled the restrictions [1] _by accident_. But now that the signed driver is out, anyone can just revert to that at any time and mine whatever they want.

Fantastic failure to a flawed endeavour.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333544/nvidia-rtx-3060-...

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That's what this article is about, yeah, NVIDIA is confirming they screwed up.

It also appears the VBIOS on MSI's 3060 cards didn't include it either, I'm not 100% clear but I'm guessing you need both here. I've seen other discussions where people report flashing it on EVGA cards and then it increases performance to the expected levels.

They can just revoke the signature, right?

Only if network access can access revocation

They can't revoke the math that makes the signature valid. As long as the card is unable to get a network connection to work out the driver is revoked, there is no going back on this.

Even if they do some CA-side revoking crap you could just have your system not check, or revert to a previous state in which the signature was not revoked.

They can adopt online signatures, it's not hard to prevent rolling back an install like that. But you now need an internet connection at update time.

I can always restore my hard disk to an earlier image, or reinstall the driver from offline sources and lock down updates with apt-get hold

You can't do that to an iPhone (or a Mac with full boot security enabled) and they could do the same thing if they wanted.

Well, that's why I don't use iPhones or Macs then.

You could just turn off full boot security, but it makes you susceptible to downgrade attacks.

Makes me wonder if it was intentional. They make more money from miners buying up all their cards, no?

i'm pretty sure they did this to prevent a class-action lawsuit

limiting a product after a purchase, i'm pretty sure this is illegal

> limiting a product after a purchase, i'm pretty sure this is illegal

NVIDIA announced this limit prior to public availability and it made widespread news, meaning everyone who bought a 3060 could reasonably be expected to know about the restriction. No chance for a class action.

Plus Nvidia can offer a full refund of the MSRP, fully knowing that even used cards go for more.

source?

A month ago on HN, for example (a couple dupes were merged into that iirc): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180260

I'm quite surprised if there isn't a binding arbitration clause somewhere, which blocks class actions

> could reasonably be expected to know

I’d wager I know about 1% or less of how restricted 99% of what I buy is.

There’s probably some term or condition on my water bill saying I can’t export it to Cuba or use it to moderate nuclear fission.

It's a GPU. It does GPU stuff, about as well as can be expected.

If you had very specific numbers in mind, you must have been looking at benchmarks, and all the benchmarks were equally locked and mining benchmarks certainly would have mentioned it.

There is not. Right of first sale. Once it's sold it's done. That's why places are so eager to add microprocessors to everything. With the right cryptography, you can lock the user out of tampering with anything.

I’m curious how this is different from shutting down a paid service or removing software features. Seems like there’s a large grey area.

I have my cheque from Sony for OtherOS class action sitting on my desk. The cheque is dated 09/16/2019 [nine years after OtherOS was disabled via firmware], and it's for three dollars and two cents.

Still makes me mad. I bought a device that plays PS3 games and runs Linux and then Sony said I have to choose.

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