Showing posts with label nvidia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nvidia. Show all posts

Friday, December 3, 2021

Over a Million WordPress sites Hacked and Chip Shortage-Sky High Video cards prices - Crypto Mining

Over a million WordPress sites breached

UPDATED: WordPress site owners hosted by GoDaddy have had their data exposed -- for months.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/over-a-million-godaddy-managed-wordpress-sites-cracked/

and my experience Crypto Mining

Alleged Chip Shortage and how to become a Crypto Millionaire or not.

The chip shortages affecting automobile production and computer pricing has been in the news lately.  We've been told lots of stories about the cause whether it's supply chain issue or pandemic related.  The chips related to auto manufacturing are supposedly low profit margin and the chip makers are not thrilled about gearing up capacity to supply the auto makers.  Ford is building a plant to make their own chips in the future.  Tesla seems to be the only auto manufacturer not affected.  I'm sure Elon Musk had already incorporated chip manufacturing in the company SOP.

Computer chips have steadily crept upward in prices, especially memory.  The computers Driving Force builds are 99% for business and don't require dedicated Graphics cards for business/cloud applications.

I recently built a new monster PC for myself so I could install/test Windows 11.  At the time there were no video cards available so I had to use an older Nvidia 750 ti card.  I thought Gamers were eating up the available supply of video cards causing shortages and steep prices.  I tried searching for video cards with at least 4GB, preferably 6 GB of memory and they are sold out everywhere.. Best Buy for example.  In addition, the price has doubled at least.  In July of 2019, I bought a NVidia 1650/4 GB Ram for $149.99 at Micro Center.




Today the same card will cost you at least $319 at Newegg, up to $390 for the same chipset.



and those are not the most expensive cards either, see below.



As I said above, I thought it was gamers causing the video cards to be scarce and the chip shortage but I was wrong.  If you watch the stock market you know Nvidia and AMD stocks are some of the hottest ones to have.  Both companies make GPUs, Graphic Processing Units and are experiencing no chip shortage.  

The demand behind their products is Crypto Mining.  That's right, GPUs are more efficient at processing crypto transactions (mining) than computer CPUs.  I've a couple of SOL (Solana) mining machines running full time at my office, one is employing the Nvidia 1650 in my main machine and the other miner is a 3rd generation Intel Core i5 processor.  I had my monster AMD Ryzen 9 mining but the strain mining placed on the CPU was too high.  It affected performance significantly as well as generated a lot of heat from the processor.  I didn't want to risk the investment in my new AMD Ryzen 9 Windows 11 machine, mining is not lucrative enough with my present setup.

However, with the right video cards and enough of them one could make a lot of money mining.  That is why so many countries and even towns in certain US states have outlawed crypto mining.

As of today  12/3/21 at 6:30 a.m. EST, since 11/29/21 11:45 a.m.  I have mined almost $2 ($1.85 to be exact) of Solana, LOL.

There has been some down time.  My initial rig was my AMD machine,  I took it offline and established my main computer with the Nvidia 1650 as a miner.  (BTW, since I don't game I don't see much performance degradation using the GPU rather than the CPU), and yesterday I added a second miner using the old Intel Core i5 computer that plods along in another room happily mining.

So there you have it.  Why there is a chip shortage, 
  1. Chip manufacturers want to build GPUs, not low profit margin auto chips (now even Intel is developing a graphics chip).
  2. GPUs in high demand by Crypto miners.
and that's my story, I'm sticking to it.

I will follow up with another article soon about my mining software and how to build your own mining rig. Also hopefully an update on extreme earnings if I can acquire the right video (GPU) card.  I want to try an ETH Ethereum miner, BTW, Solana which is currently at $236/coin is an Ethereum based alt coin.


Thursday, October 1, 2020

Global Microsoft Outage, Apple Woes, Cybercrime, Nvidia RTX 30 series graphics cards.

Global Microsoft outage brings down Teams, Office 365 and Outlook

Microsoft says a recent update has affected the processing of authentication requests, making cloud-based services inaccessible.

Microsoft Blames Software ‘Code Issue’ For Office 365 Outage

“It’s amazing to me that a change in code could cause a platform as big as Azure to go down,” says a senior executive for one of Microsoft’s top partners, who did not want to be identified. “It sounds like someone wrote some code that was merged into a production environment and it broke authentication. That’s ridiculous. If you can’t get into email or documents for five hours it’s pretty bad.” CRN

The outage affected users between the hours of 5:25 pm EST to 10:25 pm EST.  I did not hear from a single user concerning any issues.  Fortunately for us the outage occurred after normal business hours and from what I read, users who had a session established were okay.  It was only those who tried to log in during that period of time who were affected.

Microsoft attributed the Azure service outage to a “recent configuration change impacted a backend storage layer, which caused latency to authentication requests.” CRN.

https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/microsoft-blames-software-code-issue-for-office-365-outage

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/29/major-microsoft-outage-brings-down-office-365-outlook-and-teams?ref=hvper.com

https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=Office+365+Outage&qpvt=office+365+outage&FORM=NWRFSH


Apple News

Who'd have thought... Apple makes mistakes too.  Read the link below, 

iOS 14.0.1: The battery and connectivity woes continue

iOS 14.0.1 fixes some things. Breaks other things.

The bottom line is that we're into that messy period at the beginning of an iOS launch where there will be a lot of bugs and fixes and new bugs. I suspect iOS 14.0.2 is not that far away, and that it won't be long until iOS 14.1 is released, likely to be the iOS version that ships on the new iPhones.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ios-14-0-1-the-battery-and-connectivity-woes-continue/?ftag=TRE-03-10aaa6b&bhid=2219791&mid=13076371&cid=716603217

iPhone 12 64GB model incoming, says leaker, shipments start next week

A new report from serial Apple leaker Jon Prosser states the iPhone 12 will be getting a 64GB storage option, despite previous reports Apple was ditching the configuration.

https://www.imore.com/iphone-12-64gb-model-confirmed-shipments-start-next-week


Cyber Crime

Cyberattack hobbles major hospital chain's US facilities, staff forced to use paper records

https://www.foxbusiness.com/healthcare/cyberattack-hobbles-major-hospital-chains-us-facilities-staff-forced-to-use-paper-records

A computer outage at a major hospital chain thrust healthcare facilities across the U.S. into chaos Monday, with treatment impeded as doctors and nurses already burdened by the coronavirus pandemic were forced to rely on paper backup systems.

Universal Health Services Inc., which operates more than 250 hospitals and other clinical facilities in the U.S., blamed the outage on an unspecified IT “security issue” in a statement posted to its website Monday but provided no details about the incident, such as how many facilities were affected and whether patients had to be diverted to other hospitals.

Google removes 17 Android apps caught engaging in WAP billing fraud

The 17 apps were infected with the Joker (Bread) malware, which Google described in January 2020 as one of the most persistent threats it dealt with since 2017.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-removes-17-android-apps-doing-wap-billing-fraud-from-the-play-store/

The FBI's most wanted cybercriminals

https://www.zdnet.com/pictures/the-fbis-most-wanted-cyber-criminals/

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Graphics Cards

Nvidia announced their new RTX 30 graphic cards on September 17th.  The GeForce RTX 3090 was released September 24th.  I was at the Marietta Micro Center store on the 23rd of September and saw this scene that I had to take a picture of;


I first thought it was the line to get in due to the Pandemic, (there usually is a line on weekends due to restrictions on the number of people allowed in at one time), but then I saw people going into the store bypassing the line.

Once inside I asked the lady what was going on, she replied "they are camping and waiting for the release of the Nvidia graphics card tomorrow."  WOW, not only are these people going to fork over $1500 for a video card but they can afford a whole day of their life devoted to this purpose, and they don't need to work, they have the money.  SMDH.

Read more about the new Nvidia cards and while at it, be sure to buy a DForce Gaming computer.

Thanks for reading!




DFORCE Gaming Rigs, Ultra-fast performance, Powerful and expandable!













Friday, November 30, 2018

Latest Security Hack, Microsoft passes Apple as most valuable Company

Latest Hack:  Marriott says its Starwood database was hacked on approximately 500 million guests

Marriott said the Starwood guest reservation database was breached, potentially exposing information on about 500 million guests.

Among the information stolen on many of the guests includes a  combination of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences. 

Payment information may also have been accessed on some guests.

Apple and Microsoft are going head to head for world’s largest company

What you may say... Microsoft?  It was Amazon and Apple that had been vying for the richest capitalization but the online retailing giant's stock has dropped in value along with Apple's beginning in October.  Meanwhile Microsoft stock has surged in part due to 2 areas, cloud and gaming.

Microsoft's growing cloud business and strong PC sales made Microsoft one of the few tech companies to grow in value following its September quarter earnings results. Apple's valuation, meanwhile, has fallen more than 20 percent since its own earnings results.

Microsoft topped AWS (Amazon Web Services) beginning in the 1st quarter this year with IBM trailing in 3rd place.  Both IBM and Microsoft posted very good 2017 4th Qtr results with IBM topping both AWS and Microsoft.  However, the gap between Microsoft and AWS started widening in that quarter.

Gaming has become a huge industry fueled by Fortnite, Red Dead video games online forums.  Gaming machines are very lucrative for hardware companies.  Video cards capable of delivering 4K graphics and high speeds can cost more than the average business computer alone.


https://9to5mac.com/2018/11/26/apple-market-cap-microsoft/

https://9to5mac.com/2018/11/01/apple-stop-reporting-unit-sales/

https://9to5mac.com/2018/11/21/foxconn-cut-costs-iphone-sales/


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