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.
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.
The McAfee ads are just a symptom of a much bigger problem that is Windows allowing 3rd parties to install malware on “your” computer without your consent, or even your knowledge. Which makes Windows itself malware.
always has been
[astronauts_on_the_moon.gif]
🌎 🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
We need to be the one in control of our computing for it to be ‘our’ computer, instead of Microsoft’s. That requires being able to change what it does via the source code, and sharing those changes with others. Windows is proprietary, no source code and it’s illegal to share it - it can never be ‘your’ computer like that.
There needs to be regulation that divorces commercial interests from the software that let’s you use your devices and all telemetry being optional.
The software that facilitates the use of your device must be agnostic.
If one insists on only using open source software then bad changes can be removed by another dev.
Yes, hence the quotes, but thank you for elaborating.
ThioJoe on YouTube made a new video on how to disable this.
That’s great. You shouldn’t have to disable this. You should have to enable it. But this again is completely in line with what all these tech companies do. They add these new controls but do not notify the user about them and do not ask about them. It’s the user’s responsibility to periodically comb through the 3000 system settings on a regular basis to ensure they haven’t added anything.
Totally agree.
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
deleted by creator
This is being pushed as a driver update. Drivers run in ring 0. LG could be snooping on you at a very low level here.
But they promised that their installer isn’t sending any data back to LG!
They didn’t promise the app itself isn’t snooping or that McAfee isn’t snooping, but the installer isn’t snooping, they swear!
This is not a driver update. This is adware that is automatically installed with the device being connected. It is the same as how synapse is automatically installed with Razer products. If it was a driver, you wouldn’t be able to uninstall the software and have the device still work, not that a monitor needs a driver anyway.
I believe they were claiming it is installed the same as a driver, not that it’s a driver in the literal sense. That was my understanding of it too, so is that wrong? Surely Windows looks for drivers, downloads them, and this gets installed alongside. If it is not listed as a driver then why is Windows installing it? Is this a Windows issue of giving companies the ability to install optional crap or is it a company issue of hiding optional crap inside their “driver” packages?
Great, add it to the list of hundreds of others.
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
From the comments on the article:
- Open Settings → System → About → Advanced system settings → Hardware tab → Device Installation Settings.
- Select No to Automatically download manufacturer apps and icons.
How reliable is this?
Call me cynical or whatever you like, I don’t trust anything that isn’t a physical switch.
I already had it set, and so far my LG monitor hasn’t caused an LG software to be installed. But I’m on Windows 10 and I guess there’s a chance this software is only for 11.
Microsoft tends to undo settings they don’t like during updates.
It’s so fucking annoying too
It should be a crime.
To add to this, below are the group policy and registry locations to change this setting to do the same as the comment above in order to allow for automation. Of course with the disclaimer that you should only use these if you know what you are doing.
Group policy
Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Device Installation -> Prevent automatic download of applications associated with device metadata. Set the policy to enabled.
Registry (also works on Home edition)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Device Metadata. Create a REG_DWORD within called PreventDeviceMetadataFromNetwork and set the value to 1.
That’s insane it’s buried so deep in the settings. I get why, but that’s terrible
Nice and buried so the usual end users never find that setting.
Not from the article, but I have a very simple process that can help people.
Does the monitor you are interested in buying have a built in operating system?
- If yes, don’t buy it. -If no, buy it.
What built in OS are you talking about? This is affecting normal LG monitors via Windows update.
Go to LGs website and look at the monitors they are selling. Half of them come with a built in OS. It’s like 3 clicks to see it.
Don’t buy a monitor with an OS. Problem solved. And no, this isn’t happening with normal monitors just those with an OS.
And no, this isn’t happening with normal monitors just those with an OS.
Source? None of the articles I’ve seen have made that connection. And nothing about the method LG is using requires an OS on the monitor.
Edit: In fact, AFAICT, the model which they explicitly investigated and reproduced this issue on does not have an OS. So unless I’m mistaken about that, you just pulled this info out of your ass.
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, 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
I was trying to figure out why someone would install a third party driver for a monitor, of all things, and then I read this
Further, Microsoft allows Universal Windows Platform device apps “to automatically install when the user connects their device to the PC”
Is this for real? Does it at least prompt with a pop-up first?
Let me guess…
Users never read prompts, so we have removed them
Kinda like
Users never update, so we have forced that
I mean, I get forcing users to update.
If you could have nothing but pure intentions… that’s still a bad way to go about getting users to update. Users choose to not update to avoid getting fucked by Microslop.
Users choose not to update to avoid rebooting. The average user barely even knows what an OS is. They just know that if they reboot, they’ll lose their 347 Emotional Support Chrome tabs. Lemmy tends to be fairly tech literate, which means conversations about tech often involve the Average Familiarity problem:
Emotional Support Chrome tabs is my new favorite thing of the day
Chrome (and Firefox and probably every other major browser) has reopened tabs on restart for years now.
Other programs, not so much. Windows did add the feature to reopen programs fairly recently, but most of the time that means just starting the program, not actually restoring your session.
Vivaldi also does this well, and Opera before it back to at least 2001. XFCE opens the programs too but the programs themselves don’t remember state, even if gracefully closed by a normal reboot. Except Krusader which seems to remember my tabs from like 3 years ago and I have no idea how to get it to update.
Oh and 4k remains the bane of my existence with getting my shell to remember 2x scaling is stupid hard, and I have to launch special scripts to inject the 2x scaling in the launch options or environment variables. I should ask AI why my Alma 9 is being dumb.
XKCD 2501 is second nature to us internauts so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows XKCD 1053 (Ten Thousand) and XKCD 386 (Duty Calls).
It does not prompt it just does it in the background along with the driver install when you first plug it in
That’s a bunch of words, but they don’t really answer your question about why a monitor needs 3rd party drivers.
Display Port has fancy features like Display Stream Compression where the driver compresses the image going to the screen.
The solution would be for MS to move those features into Windows rather than allow manufacturers flexibility in implementation. MS would get bad publicity for monopoly and then have to deal with fixing Windows for every off brand monitor because the manufacturer didn’t follow the standard exactly.
How about we don’t compress our local Fricken wired video to our monitor. I swear I just want modern dumb VGA again - having to fight the auto smart crap is such a pita.
Yes all those features (compression is one of many ) are stupid, few if any actually use them, and it unnecessarily complicates everything.
I even hate edid. It keeps kvms from working.
Long time Linux user here.
Microsoft would fuck up their implementation of the standard, monitors would all be designed around Microsoft bugs and then OSs that implement the standard correctly have to break their stuff so that Windows monitors will work.
No. It’s supposed to be for essential device drivers, and companions apps like webcam image control.
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.
We’ve connected with the team at LG and as an immediate next step, they have agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up from their app. We appreciate LG working with us toward a shared goal of a better experience for our mutual customers. We will keep improving here with our ecosystem partners.
Corpo speech is awful, but this AI corpo speech somehow is even worse. Someone literally asked AI to come up with some transparent lies to make people believe that they care
Good job! As part of a required test protocol, we will stop enhancing the truth in three… Two… One.
Good reason not to use LG or Windows.
My Linux does not do this shit. get rekt MS and LG.
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