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.
No, crash reporting is easily done with logs, preferably in some format you could redact any sensitive information from. This seems more like the "I will secretly phone home and not tell you about it or what I'm sending" kind of thing.
These are GPU drivers. It's not at all unreasonable that there may be something sensitive shown on the screen when a crash occurs. It might not even be shown on the screen but still present in GPU memory:
> No, crash reporting is easily done with logs, preferably in some format you could redact any sensitive information from. This seems more like the "I will secretly phone home and not tell you about it or what I'm sending" kind of thing.
It's not terribly secret, now was it? It was... you know... immediately discovered and I'm pretty sure my driver changelog AND firewall asked about it.
> These are GPU drivers. It's not at all unreasonable that there may be something sensitive shown on the screen when a crash occurs.
Pardon me, could you please explain exactly what in the telemetry or common crash logs might reflect "sensitive" information? You seem to me like you're arguing from some sort of grand final consequence, "Well I assume there is sensitive data here!" And while perhaps that's not an unreasonable default policy to take, you might want to state it as such rather than implying (as you have) that it's been observed already.
In general, telemetry doesn't include bulk memory dumps. The technology for collection strongly discourages this, as the endpoints collecting standard telemetry need to run at the scale of your customer base. I'd be much more concerned about sharing log dumps if you've filled your framebuffers with confidential information.
> As such, they need to prove we can trust them before we accept this at face value. They have not done so.
This is ultimately a trust relationship with your vendor. There is nothing they can do but be trustworthy.
Don't say, "open sourcing." Open sourcing code doesn't assert much of anything about the binaries you have running. sourceless propagating binary behavior is 30 year old technology.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
That is not a really valid "opt-out" function since they are heavily advertising GFE and most of the people who have it, because they have to, have no idea what's happening. Even after this discovery, a ridiculously small amount of new people know that there is something shady going on.
This looks bad, it smells bad and it probably is just bad for the customer. The person that has already payed for the damn product and not for whatever happens in the background and I have to look up first somewhere on the internet...This behaviour towards customers is disgusting and I really hope it'll backfire in a spectacular way one day.
These are GPU drivers. It's not at all unreasonable that there may be something sensitive shown on the screen when a crash occurs. It might not even be shown on the screen but still present in GPU memory:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873059
I would not be surprised if the telemetry included some parts of GPU state which could contain sensitive data.