The RCE that AMD wouldn't fix

MITM where attacker needs to install their own CA certs on the victim's device -- sure, out of scope.

MITM because you used http instead of https and you don't have any other verified cryptographic signature on your data -- get tae fuck, fix it pronto.

Why would anyone ever exclude true mitm?

Various domain registrars have been compromised over and over again (often by children!), resulting in companies like Tesla and Cloudflare getting owned.

The reality is that any vaguely competent attacker can compromise a court clerk and just compel e.g. the .com registry to hand over whatever domain they want.

Although I suppose the aforementioned problem has significant implications beyond dns…

Out of scope in this case means "we don't wanna pay you"

Out of scope does not necessarily mean out of impact. It is merely a question of how far a company wants to be responsible for the environment their software is run in. Most of the time that answer is "not much."

But I use a Wi-Fi password, so my phone says it's secure!

Yes, their software is terrible across CPUs and GPUs, and continues to be. So many trivial bugs just never fixed.

It has literally cost them a Trillion dollars in market cap - Nvidia's CUDA is a big reason they're so much bigger than AMD.

Their pay is shit. I interviewed with them 3 years ago and they offered me peanuts I rejected their offer.

It's technically possible (though I don't know if they actually do this) that they're not referring to a signature check in the download part, but are verifying the code signing signature of the executable downloaded. You'd only notice the CRC if you were looking at the downloaded content, but if the updater refuses to launch an executable that isn't signed by AMD's cert then they would be fine.

Given the way AMD has been treating this issue, I'm assuming they're just incompetent, though.

Especially because if they had read about or studied this problem they would find tons of prior art where CRC32 was considered not secure for solving the problem. CRC32 solves a different problem -- how do you verify that the data that was received is identical to the data that was sent. It makes no guarantees about who is sending the data, which is the real problem signatures solve.

They should have done base64 encryption before the crc32. noobs

I got so mad at plex/jellyfin's crap I vibe coded an entire entertainment system out of spite.

Works great!

AMD's entire software development strategy is insane. OpenCL was doing reasonably well, and then AMD have just fully dropped support for some reason. For the - albeit not huge - but actual cross platform API that people were using to develop for their GPUs. For a while, a few cross platform tools had OpenCL backends, but nobody has been able to get AMD to fix any of the damn bugs. In my testing, bug latency for even the most trivial but important bugfixes is often 4+ years, which is utterly mad. Some parts of their compute stack is so broken its clear that nobody has ever used it. There are exploitable privilege escalation vulnerabilities caused by threaded race conditions that are wontfix

They could support OpenCL 3.0. Nvidia do. AMD just chooses not to, even though they're the ones that desperately needs to support it most

Instead, we got ROCm which has been a disaster from start to end. It barely supports windows or consumer GPUs, for some reason. Its a buggy mess, for some reason. HIP/ROCm has worse performance than OpenCL, because they downgraded their compiler and stopped extracting read/write information on variables leading to a massive loss of parallelism and utilisation on their GPUs.. for some reason. Why? What are they doing? How is this so rubbish?

Literally ALL of this is WONTFIX, and I don't have a clue why. I've filed bugs, was part of their vanguard supporter program, have tried to reach out to AMD people to (gently) explain why good support is important. Or even just figure out what technology they're even intending to support for GPU development. Is ROCm deprecated? What should we be using on windows for GPU compute on consumer hardware AMD? For the love of god amd I want to make you money

As of 2026, the best cross platform cross vendor API for doing GPU compute is.. drumroll.. OpenCL 1.2. Vulkan is getting there, but its still missing a bunch of stuff. And this is literally AMDs direct fault at this point

HIP tries to be like this, almost API compatible with CUDA such that you just need to do find and replace. I think they even had a script to do this for you.

But the issue remains that the actual support and debugging tools remain so atrocious that it doesn't help to combat the CUDA monopoly. They've further burned a lot of trust by never really delivering on their promises to do better unless you're a customer large enough to get personalized attention from their engineers.

This ends up being a double whammy because not only are you pushing away smaller businesses, you're also pushing away single developers that go on to influence purchasing/development decisions.

likewise. i'm bewildered throughout the years.

my suspicion is that it is the company culture: the hardware engineers are the real engineers. software is a triviality left for the lesser minds. the consequence is they mess up every product... everything they do needs software.

They keep choosing to work whitehat instead of blackhat, which is all AMD ever wanted.

Drivers got better after ATI merged/got bought by AMD, but ATI has a loooooong legacy of terrible drivers in Windows.

The funny thing is, in Linux, the drivers are pretty great as far as I can tell. It's not like there aren't bugs, probably, but mostly everything "just works". You can't depend on FSR in Linux, for example - Doom Eternal just goes blank if you turn it on. I can live without it, though, and everything else seems fine, including performance.

Nvidia linux drivers make me quite upset - they're fine once you finally get them working, but you approach Nvidia driver updates with extreme caution in Linux