Many years ago, when I was a PC repair tech, software that would behave like this was generally considered to be malware. Seems a little ironic that they’re McAfee ads.
Not really surprised though. That’s just how the Windows ecosystem is. I’ve never seen any other OS constantly support so much weird advertising bullshit all the time.
McAfee has always been more of an advertising application than antivirus. A free version would constantly try to scare you into buying it. A paid version always reminds you that you could be paying more to clean your PC, including showing perfectly normal settings as “potentially unwanted“. Even if you pay for all the bells and whistles, you’ll need to click away constant reminders of how good a job it is doing at protecting you.
But, to be fair, the other big names do exactly the same.
My brother got a new laptop some years back. Norton was pre-installed.
It literally hijacked the system and blocked internet access until the subscription fee was paid. Getting AVG antivirus on the laptop via USB ended up killing that ransomware thankfully.
holy hell.just bought a monitor yesterday. so glad i just narrowly dodged the LG bullet by this ->\<-much and went a different brand. whew omfg…
wait…what am i worried about? i installed linux. hah hahahaha HAHAHAHA. MUAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHHAHAHHAHAHAAAA.
Are you OK?
Installing Linux justifies evil villain laughter, best feeling in the world
Enjoying Linux is a real feeling man. You may never have felt it…
better than
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Any statement by Microsoft that doesn’t include, “so we banned them from publishing auto-installed drivers for a year” is an insufficient response to this crime.
Yeah this was a significant non answer. “We want to sound like we’re doing something without doing anything”
“Yeah, so we punished our end users because of something a manufacturer did.”
Like, I get the sentiment. But “no pushing drivers” ain’t the solution.
I also have to wonder if M$ can do that? If the drivers are being loaded by the monitor and not something like windows update, M$ has virtually no control over it.
Monitors do not need drivers. There would be no user impact to an ban on automatic installation of LG drivers.
I mean, they absolutely do. You can usually get away with the generics but I’ve run across my fair share of monitors that support minimum resolutions until the appropriate driver is installed.
This is the problem with Display Port / HDMI. VGA was so much better in a lot of ways. Video goes out, monitor displayed it or didn’t but no “you don’t have some special software to do a resolution”. None of the "oh I have to unplug it and replug it or reboot to wake the stupid video port up. You just plug in cable.
Display port is a bunch of annoying things that are unnecessary IMO and they refuse to fix.
punished the users by having them install non-essential drivers manually?
If the drivers are being loaded by the monitor and not something like windows update, M$ has virtually no control over it.
the drivers are not loaded by the monitor. they are loaded by windows update. like when your motherboard loads bloatware into your windows install, that too is actually windows update doing it for the request of the motherboard. it would be pretty wild if peripherals could install random software without coordination of the OS
Remember when autorun.ini was considered harmful?
I see this whole LG affair as a good thing. Windows users get shown how fucked up their OS and ecosystem is by this, and LG monitors will drop into the discount zone for users who have Linux and don’t have to deal with such shit.
In a sane world you would be correct. In this world you are dreaming, most of the people do not care.
most people do not care, until it personally affects them.
Then they will cry and wail about why anyone let it happen and why didnt anyone do anything to stop it.
I guess this shows how out of touch I am because how the fuck is a peripheral auto installing software on my computer in the first place? how does Microsoft allow that?
Old school way was installing peripheral, or even sometimes internal hardware drivers and apps, manually from the vendors website or disk. Modern Windows checks your hardware and the vendors send MS updates to the MS “repository” of drivers and apps. As part of the auto updates Microsoft pushes your system will be fed vendor updates for your hardware.
For the layperson this is helpful, but it is annoying as heck when you have your own application that needs a specific driver version and windows keeps trying to overwrite it.
Isn’t LG digging their own graves by pissing off their customers so much? No one is going to buy their shit anymore.
But everyone’s doing it
Most ppl doesn’t want this but won’t make research before a buy. So executive at LG dont have clear data that show it and so it continue. And competitor see this and think why aren’t we doing the same. We litteraly live in a world where we have ads in subscription for streaming service. The normal ppl have a really high tolerance to bs
Fyi Microsoft did not respond for comments
We appreciate LG working with us toward a shared goal of a better experience for our mutual customers.
Thanks LG for their professionalism and sportsmanship. We can always count on Microsoft and LG to make people’s live better! /s
My understanding is that LG broke the TOS and Microsoft asked them to stop instead of penalizing them under the agreement they broke. They wouldn’t do this for the average consumer and so the average consumer should jump ship to something else.
…like linux. and then be done with all this shit.
If a company is doing something malicious to it’s customers isn’t there a thing already to deal with that company and protect the customers? Thought it was called the government and it exists only because the said customers pay like half of their income for that government thing to protect them.
You’ve mistaken this for a working democracy with proper consumer protections and actionable laws.
But yeah. Thats how it’s supposed to work.
They get a cut, then.
Thanks Steve from gamer nexus to put a spot on this atrocities
Oof. This sucks. My two favorite monitors are LG. My pool of monitor brands I like shrinks ever tinier!
Yeah I was always a big fan of LG stuff.
Oh well.
I still have 24" DELL monitors that refuse to die. So I continue to trust them for my new one.
You also never know, I may need a VGA/svideo/component/DVI port again some day. And that is all on one monitor, including HDMI and Display Port.
Cool, a new way to smuggle viruses into corporate environments. Everyone makes sure to disable USB sticks, but you can apparently do similar stuff via HDMI or DP?
Yeah they claim it’s safe because it’s through their store, but isn’t this a direct path to a supply chain attack? One app using electron has one bad npm dependency and it auto installs and updates on every machine? This seems like a security nightmare scenario.
Bu hey marketing gets to put their shit in front of everyone’s eyes so who cares.
Only if the hardware is recognized by MS and registered to be associated with your software. The software is signed so it can be traced back to you.
for once i’m not blaming microsoft for adware
They’re still the ones enabling this method and not doing anything against offenses like this.
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Switching operating system is cheaper…
