The GPU Black Market That Washington Can't Shut Down | Hacker News Reader

The GPU Black Market That Washington Can't Shut Down

amcompute.com

37 pointsilreb11 comments

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Many years ago I worked for a firm that supported efforts to fight movie piracy for the MPAA.

One of our client reps was at a meeting where a video was shown and he described a raid in Hong Kong:

- it starts in a back alley filled with trash

- then moves through a doorway of an incredibly dirty apartment

- there is a closet with dirty clothes piled in it

- the clothes are moved away and then is a small door in the back of the closet

- the door opens into a tunnel that you have to crawl through

- there is another door

- when you go through that door you enter a state of the art clean room with an industrial DVD burning machine turning out hundreds of DVDs a day.

One of the most notable things about this is that there were parts of the machine that were larger than any entrance to the room. The MPAA folks were genuinely curious as to how the machine even got into that room.

I love to tell this story as it shows the level of ingenuity pirates will go through to produce knock off products.

An automated DVD burner is no larger than a mini fridge. Unless they meant to say a DVD press, those are much larger. The burner is fine for bootlegs, no one cares if it's not a perfect replica of the retail release. But for counterfeiting, you need a press to make legit-looking DVDs. Bootlegs are the least of concern, who cares if someone watches a movie they probably wouldn't have been able to afford anyway? But with counterfeiting, you can find TV show boxsets on Amazon that are obviously counterfeits. They sell for retail prices but one typical tell is that they use single layer DVDs (because those are cheaper to press) and often have half or less the bitrate of the original release.

> An automated DVD burner is no larger than a mini fridge. Unless they meant to say a DVD press, those are much larger

Sorry, yes, I meant to say press.

A couple years ago, I was selling individual pieces on ebay from a big box of RAM I got for cheap. Nothing exciting, just some low to midrange stuff that sold cheap (wish I held onto it a bit longer). I had quite a few people with slavic names wanting to do business outside of ebay. I turned them all down mostly because I don't sell outside of ebay. One wanted me to ship to Turkey and lie on the customs declaration about what it was. I suspected they were trying to import this stuff to Russia but I have no proof.

From the massively ai padded article.

“The ban on h200s was lifted in 2025” no smuggling needed.

gpu's?

the fucking pentagon shipped an unknown amount of F35 parts to Hongkong, where they then lost track of them, but the full list of missing parts in the globaly distributed F35 suppply chain runs to millions. the most generous view of shipping would be to say it's a 'give it your best effort' ,'please', 'if you feel like it' arangement

I thought Australia shipped them and UPS rerouted them.

I used to hate Nvidia for their closed source libraries and bad drivers on Linux. They gained my respect with this.

Why'd this get sandbagged to page 2? Pretty interesting situation, export controls have largely failed. GPUs are so plentiful they are shipping them back from China to buyers in the USA.

An AI summary with no new info since March is generally considered uninteresting by anyone paying attention.

Thanks for explaining, I hadn't heard about this.

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