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Utility Promising To Restore Mining Performance on Nvidia GPUs Actually Malware (web3isgoinggreat.com) 23

Web3 is Going Great reports: The popular Tom's Hardware and PC Gamer websites both ran articles about a utility called "Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker", which claimed to increase the artificially-limited cryptocurrency mining performance of its RTX graphics cards. These graphics cards are shipped with performance-limiting software to reduce the GPUs' attractiveness to cryptocurrency miners, whose thirst for GPUs has made it difficult and expensive for gamers and various others to acquire the hardware. Unfortunately, both publications had to run a second article just a day later to warn their readers away from the software they had just advertised.
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Utility Promising To Restore Mining Performance on Nvidia GPUs Actually Malware

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  • The old adage. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by splutty ( 43475 ) on Thursday February 24, 2022 @02:34PM (#62300259)

    Greedy people are the easiest to scam.

    Just proves it's still very true.

    • Re: The old adage. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tannhaus ( 152710 )

      I fail to see how the majority of miners - people trying to pay for their cards and maybe put a little extra money in their pocket are "greedy".

      Everyone likes to blame miners for the chip shortage and point out the big mining outfits, but miners had nothing to do with the chip shortage and it's affected every industry

      • I fail to see how the majority of miners - people trying to pay for their cards

        Hurr, durr, gud 1.

      • I fail to see how the majority of miners - people trying to pay for their cards and maybe put a little extra money in their pocket are "greedy".

        We are talking about miners who chose gpus that very specifically and publicly advertised do not have much mining capability out of the box - they are greedy because they chose to go with the lowest price tag and then blindly installed malware which purportedly made their purchasing choice something other than a completely braindead mistake, ie, the malware was supposed to convert these miners from idiots, to clever greedy scum, yeah?

        • I honestly fail to see how this makes them greedy. That's even casting aside the fact your whole point is only a point if both versions of the cards were available. They're not. We're in a chip shortage. You get what you can get.

          Then, I fail to see how someone trying to get extra performance out of their purchase is greedy. If you buy an old laptop because that's all you can get, then install linux on it because it's faster than Windows on the hardware, are you now greedy?

          This makes no sense

        • By that logic, every single person who tries to overclock their hardware is now "greedy".

          I think a lot of people want to blame cryptominers so badly for the chip shortage, that they're failing to just step back and look at the actual situation.

    • Do you mean to tell me a tech site recommended malware infected software? They were hoodwinked. Heavens to Mergatroid, say it ain't so. This must be the first time it has ever...sorry, even I was choking on what I was saying.
  • by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Thursday February 24, 2022 @02:48PM (#62300301) Homepage Journal

    I'm shocked, SHOCKED! to hear that scammers would do this. Well, not that shocked.

    • If this was a drinking game I would have passed out a long looong time ago...

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I'm shocked, SHOCKED! to hear that scammers would do this. Well, not that shocked.

      Well, they were good. They had a program that actually did do it, but was twitchy and finicky. Do this and they got a lot of uptake.

      Now make version 2 that isn't so finicky and all the v1 users will upgrade their machines blindly.

      So maximum effect.

  • nt (Score:4, Insightful)

    by shentino ( 1139071 ) <shentino@gmail.com> on Thursday February 24, 2022 @03:12PM (#62300359)

    I think what's more newsworthy than malware, is the fact that both PC Gamer and Tom's Hardware were gullible enough to recommend it.

    Talk about dropping the ball.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      I suspect they were sold on the first version, which is actually real but not very good. It was hard to set up properly, and needed near constant tweaking to find the edge case for that specific system where LHR didn't kick in.

      And for some reason didn't properly test whatever was sold as "v2" to them.

  • It's be utterly hilarious if the malware was being used to mine crypto....please let it be so!

  • It's been 000 days since the last crypto scam.

  • by shentino ( 1139071 ) <shentino@gmail.com> on Thursday February 24, 2022 @07:54PM (#62301181)
  • Thankfully, I managed to find another way of profiting on the internet than mining crypto, and I'm pretty sure that running a business is way more reliable. I managed to develop an e-commerce website using Magento and extensions like https://amasty.com/full-page-cache-warmer-for-magento-2.html [amasty.com], and I can't even imagine what I would do if I decided to start mining crypto a few years ago.

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