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Nvidia Adds Telemetry To Latest Drivers (ghacks.net) 243

An anonymous reader shares a report on Ghack: Telemetry -- read tracking -- seems to be everywhere these days. Microsoft pushes it on Windows, and web and software companies use it as well. While there is certainly some benefit to it on a larger scale, as it may enable these companies to identify broader issues, it is undesirable from a user perspective. Part of that comes from the fact that companies fail to disclose what is being collected and how data is stored and handled once it leaves the user system. In the case of Nvidia, Telemetry gets installed alongside the driver package. While you may customize the installation of the Nvidia driver so that only the bits that you require are installed, there is no option to disable the Telemetry components from being installed. These do get installed even if you only install the graphics driver itself in the custom installation dialog.Further reading on MajorGeeks.
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Nvidia Adds Telemetry To Latest Drivers

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  • by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @09:46AM (#53229093)

    Will it report the percentage of pixels that are flesh colored?

    • It tracks app tiles so more hiding that you are playing Soft Pron Adventure.

  • by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @09:46AM (#53229115)

    Installing nvidia has always been a bit of a pain in Linux, with each distro having their own way of packaging the closed source drivers. I guess even THAT is a feature in backwards 2016.

    • by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @09:58AM (#53229223)

      Installing nvidia has always been a bit of a pain in Linux...

      In the *buntus (and I would presume Debian), it is very simple:

      apt-get install nvidia-current

      Or you can use the newbie-friendly GUI to install it.

      That said, I stopped buying NVidia cards about a year ago. The Open Source AMD driver is good enough for my needs (desktop, simple gaming, 3D modeling), and continues to improve rapidly. Now, I can add "respects my privacy".

      • Re:No Linux support? (Score:4, Informative)

        by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @10:18AM (#53229401)

        > apt-get install nvidia-current

        This can break you if your card doesn't work with the current version, I'm pretty sure.
        https://linuxconfig.org/how-to... [linuxconfig.org]

        My point, however, is that it can look simple in any distro, actually be complex, and is entirely different from distro to distro. I've seen issues updating initramfs, and issues doing whatever kernel dance is required- and in the cases where it works, it isn't because of nvidia, it's because of good packaging for that distro by someone.

        > Now, I can add "respects my privacy".

        The Linux version still does, though it may simply be by accident or an unwillingness to find a way to spy in each and every distro. Still, the general feeling is that the open source AMD driver is miles better than the open source nvidia driver (a fact not the fault of the open source devs, who nvidia treats like mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them shit). Obviously, if a future version has telemetry nonsense somehow, I simply won't buy the card, but that's an issue for a future me.

        • Quite tidy in the RHEL world. ELrepo's packaging lets you do:

          yum install nvidia-detect
          yum install $(nvidia-detect)

          As you say, nothing to do with nvidia, entirely down the packager. Thing that keeps me using nvidia on linux is that their drivers are actually pretty solid. Dated experience with AMD was that features appeared and disappeared and changed between versions. Off screen rendering was hopeless, and we had far more machine lock ups requiring a visit to the machine. Open source AMD driver wasn't

      • by myrdos2 ( 989497 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @12:31PM (#53230535)

        Yeah. It's getting kind of ridiculous.

        Smithers: Do you know where I can buy some, uh... spyware?

        Shopkeeper: SPYWARE?! Everything is spyware! Operating system made of spyware! Browser made of spyware! Look! All computer made of spyware!

        Smithers: (picks up a graphics driver) I'd like to buy this.

        Shopkeeper: Only Bitcoin! (whispers) American money is made of spyware.

    • As much as I like Nvidia, if they try to stuff this telemetry shit on their Linux blob drivers, I'll be lifting my middle-finger at them and telling them to Fuck Off, like Linus did a while back. The lack of bullshit like this is a BIG part of WHY I use Linux exclusively..

      • It's really too bad the Nouveau guys don't have more resources. The Nvidia drivers are already very problematic because they don't integrate very well and don't support the newer kernel features. My laptop goes haywire any time I switch from docking station mode to regular mode or back; it really shouldn't be like that in 2016. Nouveau drivers are integrated much better, but their performance is lousy.

      • by Altrag ( 195300 )

        Unfortunately, unless there's enough backlash to make nVidia change their mind.. there's probably at most 2 years before AMD and Intel and every other video card manufacturer (are there still others?) hop on the "me too" bandwagon since turning down an essentially free income source is rather un-American. And any sort of user tracking is a potential income source these days.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07, 2016 @09:59AM (#53229227)

    Not that we should ban telemetry outright, but in the very least, we should know what data is being reported.

    • Not that we should ban telemetry outright, but in the very least, we should know what data is being reported.

      If we're going to go to the trouble necessary to have a law, let's also force it default off. The maker can always trick the user into turning it on during the installation process.

  • by lobiusmoop ( 305328 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @10:00AM (#53229233) Homepage

    For entertainment value, here's the Nvidia driver download page from 2001 [archive.org], with the driver weighing in at 6Mb.

    Compare with 15 years later, driver is now 300Mb... [nvidia.co.uk].

    Software bloat at it's finest.

    • by zifn4b ( 1040588 )

      For entertainment value, here's the Nvidia driver download page from 2001 [archive.org], with the driver weighing in at 6Mb.

      Compare with 15 years later, driver is now 300Mb... [nvidia.co.uk].

      Software bloat at it's finest.

      Even more entertainment value: https://sourceforge.net/projec... [sourceforge.net]. The libraries that get linked in/to are much larger now as well.

    • Software bloat at it's finest.

      Bloat is an increase in size with no benefit to the end user. The graphics cards even at the lowest and most basic level are required to do far, and above all are capable of far more than they were in the past.

      Is it software bloat that we can now hardware decode h.264?
      Is it software bloat that we can now run arbitrary code at high speed?
      Is it software bloat that we can do massively parallel computations, run complex shaders and post processing?

      Yeah sure telemetry is worthless bloat, but the other 250MB of t

  • Figure out what they are reporting, then set up a botnet to flood their servers with false telemetry. They will get sick of it quickly.
    • Re:Maybe check first (Score:4, Informative)

      by lpevey ( 115393 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @11:16AM (#53229937)

      I have a GTX 980, so I immediately RTFA and looked for the task they referenced in the Task Scheduler. FWIW, I did not find the task referenced in the article or anything at all related to nvidia. I have the latest driver package from nvidia installed. YMMV.

      • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        Unless the task is running on the card and not in Windows.

        • by zlives ( 2009072 )

          which would contradict the article.
          however this brings up a question about trustworthy computing.

        • by Altrag ( 195300 )

          Its not. I've got an nVidia card and I'd found the tasks before, but I'd assumed they were associated with geForce Experience (which I removed as soon as I discovered that they force a login even to just run the driver update -- which is the only reason I ever cared about that app in the first place.. I don't use shadowplay or game profiles or any of that other crap.)

          I ended up having to use the DDU since the driver uninstaller crashed repeatedly, essentially giving me a full clean reinstall (sans Experien

      • I have a GTX 980, so I immediately RTFA and looked for the task they referenced in the Task Scheduler. FWIW, I did not find the task referenced in the article or anything at all related to nvidia. I have the latest driver package from nvidia installed. YMMV.

        It is not a task, it is a service. If you found no NVidia processes, you either don't have an NVidia GPU after all, or you looked in the wrong place. There are three beneign ones you should have and two malicious ones you can kill.

  • by aepervius ( 535155 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @10:10AM (#53229319)
    I am 100% certain that they would only be able to collect only crash data from EU citizen, as anything else, including usage or even something as simple as the percentage of pink pixel would break privacy laws and the right of correction.
    • by tomxor ( 2379126 )

      I am 100% certain that they would only be able to collect only crash data from EU citizen, as anything else, including usage or even something as simple as the percentage of pink pixel would break privacy laws and the right of correction.

      The sample data from the article: http://www.canardpc.com/downlo... [canardpc.com] at a glance it looks mostly like detailed hardware info and then a list of all the games you own.

      • by e r ( 2847683 )

        ... it looks mostly like detailed hardware info and then a list of all the games you own.

        For now.

        I, for one, will be considering very carefully AMD cards and open source drivers for my next GPU upgrade (I use Linux) and I will fully explain why to my wife, my brother, and all my friends and co-workers.

      • by Altrag ( 195300 )

        Detailed hardware info could be a potential privacy risk, though a very low one.

        A list of games you own is likely very personalized. Everyone has their own preferences not to mention which specific games are installed at any one time out of a possibly large digital library -- even if nVidia can't read the full Steam or GoG or Origin or whatever libraries (and they probably can't -- at least not yet,) the subset of installed games at any one time could theoretically add a temporal component to an already qu

  • by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @10:20AM (#53229411) Journal

    Or will the driver not function without it?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Noishkel ( 3464121 )
      Just uninstall 'GeForce Experience'. The tracking is all inside of it.
  • Holy Shit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday November 07, 2016 @10:25AM (#53229461) Homepage Journal

    All this time I wondered what AMD could possibly do to convince me to try their video cards again. Now I know it was nVidia that had to do something all along.

    • Re:Holy Shit (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward 912 ( 4742933 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @11:04AM (#53229837)
      Your list is way shorter than mine. For me AMD would also have to start following hardware specifications, lower the power consumption on their cards to reasonable levels, and figure out how to write drivers for their products.
      • Their drivers are fine, and have been since a few years after ATI was acquired by AMD.

        I will agree with you greatly on the power consumption, although the latest generation has come a long way. and *gasp*, they work in Linux out of the box.

        • I could write a book about how many problems ATI/AMD drivers have caused me until I finally gave up and went Nvidia a couple years ago, which includes programs outright crashing left and right. After I got an Nvidia card, I could run every game I threw at it except for one... Viper Racing... and that game is about 18 years old.

          With that said, I'm happy with these older drivers I'm using now. I think I'll treat my Nvidia drivers like my copy of Windows7 and [backup web browser] Firefox 47.

      • by Misagon ( 1135 )

        AMD's GPU are in general larger in transistors and compute-units than the closest competitor from Nvidia.
        The difference is that while AMD's offerings should have been giving better price/performance if you only look at the numbers, Nvidia's hardware and software have been more optimized and therefore more capable in practice.

        In August, one of those optimizations were revealed by tech site Real World Tech [realworldtech.com]:
        Nvidia does a kind of tile-based rasterization of opaque polygons to avoid having to run shaders for pix

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          RWT "showed" that using a generations-old card, from a time when it's unlikely that Nvidia used tile-based rasterization, either. Modern AMD cards do use tile-based rasterization. They have since at least the Tonga chip, and possibly earlier - I don't recall for certain. (As a hint, any card that uses color compression has to use tile-based rasterization.) If you don't believe me, it's been discussed thoroughly on some of the more technically oriented forums.

          The performance gap between the AMD architect

      • For me AMD would also have to start following hardware specifications, lower the power consumption on their cards to reasonable levels, and figure out how to write drivers for their products.

        nVidia has been caught playing fast and loose with power envelopes in the past, and the only way they stay within them is doing the same kind of performance-limiting power-based throttling that AMD is doing in their updated driver. I just had my first bluescreen in months (maybe years) while hardly doing anything and subsequent reboot took forever. Most IRQ not equal errors are video driver failures. I'm not convinced that nVidia can write drivers, either.

    • ATI has MOM.exe as part of their Catalyst Control Center package.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07, 2016 @10:33AM (#53229567)

    See subject: This is task scheduler driven in windows so cut out these entries there & poof/voila, it's gone:

    NVidia Telemetry monitor
    NVidia Crash and Telemetry reporter (2 of these are present)

    (Each is GUID/SID marshalled (OLE type))

    * Each time you update your drivers using the std. installer, this will PROBABLY have to be done (this is also the case w/ .exe's they used under %Program Files% in 64-bit & %Program Files (x86)% in 32-bit as well for nvtray.exe (if you don't like it, OR, NVBackend (can be disabled in tools like MSConfig start up area OR autoruns (far more comprehensive)).

    (Personally on that LAST group, I go into the program files area & rename .exe files involved for 'geforce experience' IF you don't use it (I don't) along w/ DLL's those .exe files call functions from, but you have to be careful if you run STEAM games (bullshit imo, I like local diskbound games) there...)

    Lastly - on updating a driver?

    You don't REALLY need to use their std. installer - just extract it (goes beneath a NIVDIA folder & driver folder is what you use) & go to device manager & use it's properties page to update the driver (iirc, this doesn't install ALL NEW files, only strictly .sys driver related ones - feel free to correct me IF I am off here). This worked FINE for me going from build 375.63 to 375.70 current driver build.

    Of course, you can also monitor what servers these things talk to w/ say, NirSofer's Network Latency View (or his other network tools) & block it by hostname (if it's done that way) OR ip address in firewalls too.

    APK

    P.S.=> In the end, this invasive spying is really, Really, REALLY getting "outta control" imo (well, not out of MY control or yours @ this point per the above)... apk

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07, 2016 @10:47AM (#53229685)

    The thing about software like this, whether it be Microsoft, nVidia, or whoever, is that they have FULL access to your computer. Not just the current user, they have administrator access. They could, either by choice, accident or malice, send ANYTHING they want off of your computer. Tax forms, SSN's, bank account information, passwords, personal photos, etc.

    That's fucked up.

  • No mention of this when I purchased my card. Wonder how long before the lawsuit starts.
  • by Noishkel ( 3464121 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @11:06AM (#53229855)

    Basically just don't use 'GeForce Experience'. Honestly unless you're just one of these weird-os that can't live without social medial integration of your games then you can avoid all of this by not installing Experience. And honestly, why would any one?

    Of course then this will only probably work until they make it mandatory, as these companies always try to do.

  • It amazes me that regardless of all the historical evidence, corps still keep right on thinking that they can pull this kind of shit off and end-users will be too dumb to ever notice.

    No doubt nVidia will come up with some lame excuse about how its anonymized or that its just to improve our user experience or whatever, just like all the other corps that have ever got caught doing this kind of shit always do.

  • by Noishkel ( 3464121 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @11:29AM (#53230031)

    Just confirmed this on my own system. This telemetry is all a part 'GeForce Experience'. People should just uninstall that crap anyway as there's really nothing of value in that product anyway.

  • Take that, Nvidia. I'm guessing some power user will outline how to block telemetry with WIndows Firewall / hosts file.

  • I can't seem to find any comments telling if it is implemented in the Linux drivers as well?

    Anyway, as another poster as mentioned, I guess somebody will have to run tcpdump and see where it connects, then block those IPs, unless the driver stops working without it but I would doubt it since video would stop working on non-connected machines.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Security is a bitch and we can't secure anything if we don't have complete control over the complete set of source code needed for each and every component including keyboard controllers, LCD controllers, graphics chips, wifi chips, and so on need to be released in full and not just an 'open source' wrapper around some proprietary firmware either (I'm looking at you AMD).

    It's why I'm hostile to Lenovo, HP, Dell, Toshiba, Apple, and Sony (computers) as these companies implement digital restrictions in propri

    • by Altrag ( 195300 )

      And how do you guarantee that the manufacturer hasn't added the odd extra circuit that wasn't in the base design? I guess if 3D printing gets advanced enough that you can print your own electronics.. but then you still have the compiler backdoor issue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing)#Compiler_backdoors [wikipedia.org] if the printer was built to recognize certain designs and modify them as it was printing. So now you have to build your own 3D printer (and it has to be advanced enough to print electronic

  • by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Monday November 07, 2016 @01:02PM (#53230831) Homepage

    You suddenly find £2,000 gone from your bank account [bbc.co.uk] and the bank blames you (as not in this Tesco case). You audit; you are up to date with all virus bashing software, etc, ... how else could your data have gone ? You then find that 'telemetry' is being sucked from your machine, Nvidia/Microsoft/... refuse to disclose what they have taken from your machine; they will not say how they protect what they have taken or who they share it with. Can you go after them ?

  • by Holi ( 250190 )
    It sends info to Google Analytics.
  • by Torodung ( 31985 ) on Monday November 07, 2016 @01:31PM (#53231043) Journal

    I just checked my Task Scheduler, and none of those Nvidia telemetry tasks identified by MajorGeeks have ever run. I've just enabled "tasks history" (i.e.: chron logs) from admin to see if it's actually doing anything. The tasks only appear when you run Task Scheduler with admin rights, so access is restricted to users with administrator rights. From the history, I think this telemetry might be in the works, but not running yet.

    It's possible that since it is an admin task and I run in a limited user account (standard account), it's not triggering the task, but the tasks are supposed to be triggered by login of "any user," with a daily report at 12:45 on my machine if there's no login to trigger, so I can't see how that's happening. This all should be working, but it appears to be dead at this time on my machine with the latest drivers.

    I do have GeForce Experience 3 installed, and it *is* asking for a login, however. So it seems they're tagging *something* to an account.

    The GeForce forums are a shitstorm of "ditch the login" posts in every GFX thread. People are threatening boycotts, etc. It's really quite interesting. Here's the initial feedback thread [geforce.com] when GFX 3 went live. Bring popcorn.

    • by Torodung ( 31985 )

      Yup. Sure enough it runs when I log in my admin account, but it doesn't run when I log in my standard account. I'm sure Nvidia will fix this soon, and then I'll have to disable the tasks, and then they'll make it so GFX 3 enables them on run, and so on and so forth in a never-ending battle for privacy vs. data mining.

      Somebody will probably wind up running a background task that continuously turns this crap off.

    • Yeah, these tasks all run as a local user rather than SYSTEM, so when I log in with my standard account, the admin account that it's running under isn't logged in, and the condition for launch on any login is not met.

      Error message:

      Task Scheduler did not launch task "\NvTmMon_{B2FE1952-0186-46C3-BAEC-A80AA35AC5B8}" because user "[COMPNAME]\[ADMIN_USERNAME]" was not logged on when the launching conditions were met. User Action: Ensure user is logged on or change the task definition to allow launching when us

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