Yeah, maybe I am missing something, but what is new or interesting about this story? In the first Fast and Furious movie they were hijacking trucks to steal DVD players and TV/VCR combinations to sell on the black/grey market. Isn't this the exact same thing except with newer tech?
This. The boost is undoubtedly tied to organized crime, and organized crime is very aware of mining operations (particularly in Asia). These won’t be showing up on eBay. Spot on observation.
Organized entities don’t take a truck unless they have a guaranteed outcome in mind.
This just gives Nvidia an excuse to ship cryptographically signed firmware that checks serial numbers burnt into the card and disables the card remotely.
Make no mistake; they have the capability to ensure that those cards are paperweights. Just look at the nouveau project and how post-Maxwell cards are effectively locked into proprietary drivers via cryptograpgic signature verification of the firmware blob gating access to the power management and reclocking API's.
Well, the real life GPU thieves probably didn’t do a high speed heist by driving cars in formation with the truck. They say the cards were stolen en route, but it’s probably just that they took the truck at a truck stop.
In these cases the driver is generally paid to walk away, play dumb, or some combination of the two. Escalating to violence taking a truck undermines long-term success doing the same, just like modern piracy somewhat forced shipping lines to enhance security, thereby making piracy harder.
Organized crime in the US figured out a long time ago that hurting a driver generally leads to the collapse of the whole operation and indictments. Ask any trucker how often they’re approached.
The whole romantic scene of a hijacking or theft is plausable. But I also have my money on inside jobs. I knew a truck driver who was a thief. One story:
PS2 is released. He goes to the Bestbuy warehouse to pickup a skid of 20 PS2's to deliver to a Bestbuy. They seal the trailer BUT the supervisor at the warehouse was busy so he hands the seal to my friend to put on the trailer. My friend slips it on and makes it look like he snapped it together but didn't. Warehouse guy sees the "sealed" trailer and signs the paperwork. 8 of those 20 PS2's didn't make it to Bestbuy. He unloaded them with the help of his wife and then simply snapped the seal on. The store manager accused him of the theft since it was a local point to point delivery and inspected the trailer for holes or signs of theft but found nothing. He shrugged and said well your guy signed for this count and sealed the trailer so not my problem.
He also told me the owner of the trucking company used the warehouse as his own personal shopping mall. Turns out the whole trucking company, drivers, warehouse workers, management, owner, all of em, were stealing. And yes, they eventually got caught. But it happens all the time.
