Hacker News Reader

How about this... some of these will probably be sold to unwitting gamers, right? So push a driver update with the hot serial numbers and have it pop up a window saying "tell us who sold you this GPU and not only will we let you keep the card, but we'll even throw in a free year of GeForce now" (EVGA can foot the bill). Then track down the thieves, done.

View on HN

> some of these will probably be sold to unwitting games, right?

Probably not, they’re more likely to get used for mining by someone who knows they’re stolen. The thieves already know that selling them is extremely risky. Which is why tracking from the driver is an interesting idea, but also probably won’t work. But then again, we’re only speculating, so maybe it’d work!

"push a driver update with the hot serial numbers and have it pop up a window"

Sure that runs foul of computer misuse act, millioms od people were downloading a driver, and you used it to get admin rights and take control of their computer, and 99.9% of them have no stolen GPU.

It's like if you broke into and searched every house in London to find a batch of srolen iPhones, you aren't allowed to do that

I’m almost certain everyone already does this. Even as far back as the Pentium III has there been an opcode for any soft vendor to retrieve a CPU ID

Reply on news.ycombinator.com