Re:Nvidia BIOS Signature Lock Broken – What Caused Open-Sour...
by SenAnder on Monday August 21, 2023 @08:17PM
(#37216990)
> NVIDIA's public reasoning was to prevent fraudulent individuals/companies from flashing a vBIOS of a higher-end graphics card onto a lower-end product to sell it at a premium as if it were the higher-end product.
Of the many ways to verify a product isn't counterfeit, they just had no choice but to pick the one that takes away all control from the consumer. Meanwhile phones solved this ages ago - a "bootloader unlocked" message at boot. But NVIDIA is tactically ignorant of that possibility.
It's long past the time we start calling out these PR statements as what they are - lies. Publications should only repeat their PR lies as:
"NVIDIA lied, claiming this was to prevent fraud, despite being aware of ways to combat this fraud without taking control away from the user. When asked for comment, their PR representative gave only evasive answers."
Re:Nvidia BIOS Signature Lock Broken – What Caused Open-Sour...
by PlutoIsAPlanet on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @03:42AM
(#37219770)
> Of the many ways to verify a product isn't counterfeit, they just had no choice but to pick the one that takes away all control from the consumer. Meanwhile phones solved this ages ago - a "bootloader unlocked" message at boot. But NVIDIA is tactically ignorant of that possibility.
A phone has a boot chain, where it's likely the first 2 stages can't be unlocked without keys or a soc exploit, these stages have full access to the display, thus these stages can show a warning on the screen, it's not comparable to GPU firmware.
There's likely many reasons why Nvidia locks their cards down, but I doubt that preventing forgery isn't one of them, there's no lie.
Re:Nvidia BIOS Signature Lock Broken – What Caused Open-Sour...
by RetroTechie on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @08:54AM
(#37222024)
Ah right. There's no read-only hardware registers that ID product & supported features?
Said hw registers non-moddable by firmware?
If such hw registers don't exist, why not?
If they do exist, what's the problem with firmware claiming support for x, y or z when the hardware says otherwise? The market will weed out shady sellers soon enough.
Of the many ways to verify a product isn't counterfeit, they just had no choice but to pick the one that takes away all control from the consumer. Meanwhile phones solved this ages ago - a "bootloader unlocked" message at boot. But NVIDIA is tactically ignorant of that possibility.
It's long past the time we start calling out these PR statements as what they are - lies. Publications should only repeat their PR lies as:
"NVIDIA lied, claiming this was to prevent fraud, despite being aware of ways to combat this fraud without taking control away from the user. When asked for comment, their PR representative gave only evasive answers."
A phone has a boot chain, where it's likely the first 2 stages can't be unlocked without keys or a soc exploit, these stages have full access to the display, thus these stages can show a warning on the screen, it's not comparable to GPU firmware.
There's likely many reasons why Nvidia locks their cards down, but I doubt that preventing forgery isn't one of them, there's no lie.
Said hw registers non-moddable by firmware?
If such hw registers don't exist, why not?
If they do exist, what's the problem with firmware claiming support for x, y or z when the hardware says otherwise? The market will weed out shady sellers soon enough.