
Nvidia  adds telemetry to latest drivers - schwarze_pest
http://www.majorgeeks.com/news/story/nvidia_adds_telemetry_to_latest_drivers_heres_how_to_disable_it.html
======
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
michaelt

      And that gives you a bit more courage to release things
      early because you'll see problems faster and can fix them.
    

I gotta say, if the major benefit of telemetry is that vendors can test less
before they release, that sounds like a bad thing not a good thing for users?

~~~
Namrog84
Bad for few users. But great for most.

Testing less means they can release sooner.

Here is a bad example. New game comes out. Graphical driver glitch crash.
Typically would take 2 weeks to get to public as whole. Now with this they can
release in 2 days to 10% fix up and release to whole by end of first week. So
90% of population got a fix sooner(1 week) And some percentage of the 10% may
have had some annoyances. Sucks for them. But if they roll out in a way that
minimizes this. It'd be beneficial to all overall.

~~~
michaelt
Here's a different example: A new driver improves game performance for 99.9%
of customers, and disables graphics output for 0.1% of customers. The bug
could have been caught with a few days of automated testing in a test lab with
lots of different cards and system configurations, but that's slow and costs a
lot of money to maintain - chucking it over the wall to consumers is quicker
and cheaper.

Seems to me getting the poorly tested drivers earlier isn't much of a deal for
users. After all, just because I'm in the 99.9% this week, doesn't mean I will
be next week.

~~~
Klathmon
But in my experience there are a few more 9's on your "works" number for a
specific issue.

Hardware-related problems are so fucking hard to debug in a lab. Many of the
issues i've dealt with in the past only show up with pretty esoteric hardware
mixtures, or are so specific that i'd be surprised if more than one person has
that exact config on the planet.

A test lab might be able to get maybe a hundred different configurations. But
in the wild, something like 60% of our users are on unique hardware
configurations (as in nobody else has that exact set of hardware among our
users).

Telemetry is pretty much the only real way you are going to be able to support
a wide range of hardware when you start interacting with it on the lower
levels, because buying and assembling all the different configurations is all
but impossible, even if you prioritised it.

------
brink
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.

~~~
ronjouch
So annoying, yes. I since uninstalled GeForce Experience and replaced update
notifications (the only feature I was using) with this ugly batch script.
Careful, it's ugly! Botched stackoverflow-oriented batch brogramming! But it
works for me! Feel free to reuse and improve :)

    
    
        @ECHO OFF
        setLocal EnableDelayedExpansion
    
        rem nvup.bat, a quick & dirty driver downloader since GeForce Experience requires a login.
        rem In a folder with write permissions, drop the script and its two dependencies:
        rem  - jq: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
        rem  - curl: https://curl.haxx.se/
        rem For automation, just create a Scheduled Task that runs when you want it (I like on Resume).
        rem Reuse / modify / redistribute at will.
    
        rem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19131029/how-to-get-date-in-bat-file
        for /f "tokens=2 delims==" %%a in ('wmic OS Get localdatetime /value') do set "dt=%%a"
        set "YY=%dt:~2,2%" & set "YYYY=%dt:~0,4%" & set "MM=%dt:~4,2%" & set "DD=%dt:~6,2%"
        set "HH=%dt:~8,2%" & set "Min=%dt:~10,2%" & set "Sec=%dt:~12,2%"
        set "datestamp=%YYYY%%MM%%DD%" & set "timestamp=%HH%%Min%%Sec%"
        set "fullstamp=%YYYY%-%MM%-%DD%_%HH%-%Min%-%Sec%"
        echo lastCheck: "%fullstamp%" > lastCheck.log
    
        rem to get the update feed for your device/OS combo, go to http://www.geforce.com/drivers
        rem , pick your device/os, pop the "Network" tab of your devtools, start the driver search,
        rem and copy the url
        curl --silent -o rawNv.json "http://www.geforce.com/proxy?..."
    
        for /f "delims=" %%i in ('jq ".IDS[0].downloadInfo.DownloadURL" rawNv.json') do set lastUrl=%%i
    
        set /p installedUrl=< installedUrl.txt
    
        if %installedUrl%==%lastUrl% (
          echo same version, quitting
          exit /B
        ) else (
          echo new version, updating
          echo %lastUrl% > installedUrl.txt
          pushd C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Downloads
          %~dp0\curl -O %lastUrl%
          popd
          rem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/774175/show-a-popup-message-box-from-a-windows-batch-file
          mshta "javascript:alert('New driver');close()"
        )

~~~
rocqua
Sadly, that doesn't allow use of shadowplay.

There are some older versions of nvidea experience floating around that still
work with shadowplay without the login.

~~~
Fej
Use OBS instead.

~~~
drivebyops
Shadow play has that record last X minutes feature that OBS doesn't I think

~~~
Zahreddine
OBS does, OBS studio doesn't.

It's replay buffer where you start the replay buffer and it will keep the last
n seconds of footage in a buffer. You set a keybind to save that buffer to
file.

[https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-classic-how-to-
us...](https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-classic-how-to-use-the-
replay-buffer.103/)

------
eswat
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
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.

~~~
simooooo
I created an account named something like fuckyou just for making me sign up.
Now they email me addressing me as "fuck you. Have you seen.." :/

~~~
nobodyshere
As an option I sometimes register an account with fake email like the one you
can get from 10minutemail

------
bhouston
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
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
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
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
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
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
>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
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....](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics.md)

~~~
blub
Google analytics. Anonymous. Couldn't possibly be used to track them.

You've either missed the last decade of privacy-related discussions or you're
playing for team spyware yourself.

Companies like Google have billions, lawyers lobbyists, sociologists and every
bloody specialist working for them to suck all information out of everybody
and there's always some clueless person jumping to their defense with some
pointlessly pedantic arguments. _Because we don 't want to be unfair towards
Google or nvidia._

~~~
dogma1138
It's not about missing the privacy discussion it's about the public at large
not giving a flying duck about it, regardless of what you think.

Pick a random person on the street and ask them, you need to understand that
by enlarge simply by knowing about this site you are already part of a tiny
subculture of of the general population, and most likely living in a walled
garden as far as your social connections goes.

People don't opt in, but they don't care about their privacy just look at the
amount of people that would sign up for a mailing list/club benefits at a
store they'll only visit maybe once in their life for a 5-10$ worth of
discount that they'll never lose - for that they'll be willing to give up a
whole lot more of personal information that GA or NVIDIA GFE collects.

This doesn't excuses the practices, it's just the reality we live in.

~~~
blub
People can't be expected to understand all the subtle aspects of privacy,
medicine, drugs, automobiles and many other things.

That's why there are laws which by default protect those people from the
maliciousness, greed or incompetence of companies. And why the US needs strong
privacy laws.

The fact that the masses don't understand something is irrelevant.

~~~
Karunamon
And what of the people that do "understand all the subtle aspects of privacy",
and disagree with your conclusions?

~~~
blub
With so many battles being lost, an apathetic or ignorant public and few
resources those people just waste everyone's time and help abusers indirectly.

------
nanch
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
How about buying AMD gfx cards instead?

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

~~~
EpicEng
Why, exactly?

~~~
squarefoot
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
Nouveau has no CUDA support, unfortunately.

~~~
valarauca1
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/)

~~~
maksimum
I agree with your point about avoiding vendor lockins, something I experienced
for myself with MATLAB. I also happened to buy a RX 480 recently, so I'm happy
to hear it's good for GPGPU.

But I'm curious in how the FLOPS on these cards were measured. For example one
concern I have is that presumably these two cards have slightly different
levels of parallelism. So it may be more or less difficult to extract the full
performance from a particular card due to parallelism overhead. Then there's
driver overhead, ease of programming, etc.

~~~
valarauca1
FLOPS is always calculated via the simple formual

    
    
          F * (1/Hz) * 2 = FLOPS
    

Where F is # of FPU front ends (SIMD and scalar). This is wrong because scalar
math often is slower then SIMD, and compute kernels rarely run on the scalar
pipeline.

Where Hz is the well.. the clock rate, inverse to get cycles per second. This
is wrong because stalls happen, memory transfers, cache misses etc. It is also
wrong because the clock rate is throttled and you are not always at Maximum
boost clock.

Then multiply by 2 for FMA (fused multiply add). This is wrong because well
not every operation is a one cycle FMA. Division can be many (>100). Also
scalar pipelines don't have FMA.

Ultimately all vendors use the same crappy calculation so we are comparing
apples to apples. Just rotten apples to rotten apples. It gives you a good
_ideal_ circumstance you can optimize towards but never actually attain.

------
shmerl
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.

------
Animats
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...](https://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx)

~~~
Bjartr
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)

------
proactivesvcs
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
Go a step further and abandon their platform. Don't financially support their
behavior. Convince your clients to do the same.

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

------
isaac_is_goat
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.

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

~~~
zanny
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.

------
deadcast
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." :)

------
cturner
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
Hopefully POWER9 by then.

------
robohamburger
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.

------
awinter-py
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.

------
andybak
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?

------
deviate_X
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.

------
elihu
Any idea if the Linux drivers do this as well?

~~~
Zelmor
Geforce experience is not available for linux.

------
srj
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.

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

------
hobarrera
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

~~~
imtringued
GeForce Experience is a seperate application that automatically updates the
drivers for you. ShadowPlay is their hardware accelerated video capture
software. They are optional.

------
eveningcoffee
This behaviour is not acceptable.

------
cheiVia0
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.

------
frik
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)?

------
youdounderstand
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?

~~~
r1ch
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
Doubt it's tracking all applications. Probably only GPU heavy ones like games,
CAD and creative tools like Photoshop and Premiere.

~~~
voltagex_
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.

