101–110 of 671 posts
McAfee should be classified as a virus
When you uninstall, they give you an opportunity to type a reason. I wonder if anyone actually reads my accusations of them being scammers and bad people. I have uninstalled McAfee from more people’s computers than I care to remember.
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I don't know about the BSDs but in Linux the reason is that a volunteer (in principle it could be a paid employee, I guess maybe it is for RHEL etc?) decides what gets installed It is absolutely possible that when you plug in an LG display it installs and runs software on your Linux system†, just that rather than "Somebody at LG who earned a bonus" the decision maker was Sara in Portugal who fat fingered a change whe…
I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. There is no mechanism in standard Linux distributions to automatically download software from a vendor when you plug a device (apart from firmware updates through fwupd, but those are curated). So perhaps you could elaborate?
Now, when I first ran Linux in the mid-1990s, this was true. "Plug-and-play" is just peaking over the horizon. Other systems have had it for years (the Amigans for example) but for the PC it's pretty new.
But today a whole lot of mechanism is spun up when the kernel realises something new was added. A netlink socket talks to a udev daemon, in userspace and that daemon, being ordinary userspace software can do whatever it wants including of course run a bunch of arbitrary shell scripts, which can in turn do whatever they want. So yes of course they could download arbitrary software, or delete all your files with a Z in their name.
> from a vendor
Where the Adware comes from is of no consequence to the end user. "Um actually, the file came from Microsoft's servers" is irrelevant.
[Speaking more specifically of fwupd, which is ultimately fed by hardware vendors directly]
> but those are curated
I'm sure Microsoft considers that they are curating their system too. We both just think (I assume you're not here to defend Microsoft) their curation sucks.
I want to be sure we're pointing at the right thing here. The problem isn't that your Windows PC can end up running software because a device was plugged in, that's actually convenient and a benefit to many people and that works in Linux. The problem is what was delivered.
My current windows 10 install is cleaner than any other windows machine I've ever owned due to using Claude to deep dive and rip stuff out.
This is so much worse that the title makes it out to be: 1. Your OS installs malware (technically manufacturers software) from a 3rd party vendor in background, zero user interaction 2. Happens as soon as you or anyone with physical access plug in a device into the HDMI port 3. That malware has internet and full system access, no sandboxing 4. It starts with every system boot 5. This software gets installed when you…
I can only conclude that Windows is basically malware now... Thank $deity I haven't used any form of Windows for 10+ years anymore.
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I don't feel like spending my money on some horrible corpo pulling out stuff like this, even if I've been using linux since 2006. Who can tell if they will do this to other OS in the future?
This is probably Windows pulling LG software through Windows Update bases in EDID. Linux won't ever do this BS.
Arch Linux's AUR was recently hit by an actual malware supply-chain attack[1], which I would claim is arguably worse than adware. NPM is regularly in the news for supply-chain attacks. And then there was the XZ utils debacle in 2024. I concede that Microsoft is in part responsible for facilitating something like this, but just because something is free and open-source or based on Linux doesn't make it a universal panacea for malware or supply-chain pwnage.
[1]: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/aur-general@lists....
This is an excellent use of agentic AI, btw. Fire Claude up and say, "Remove LG malware and mcafee from this computer. Make regex changes so it can't be installed again." My current windows 10 install is cleaner than any other windows machine I've ever owned due to using Claude to deep dive and rip stuff out.
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It is the same when you plug in a Logitech mouse nowadays, no? At least they don't install McAfee
I have a logitech mouse and I'm pretty sure I was asked whether to install the logitech app, it didn't do it automatically. Same for the dell mouse I have at work, it asked to install dell somethingorother, which I declined, and it left me alone.
Edit: To be fair, I immediately uninstalled it, so I don't know if this was "just" a link to their installer app or the full app. But something definitely got downloaded and moved to a place I could not have moved it myself without accepting a UAC prompt m
Autorun of malware when you plugged in a USB drive was also a Windows issue, I'd classify this as the same security problem.
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Honestly yeah MS should get all the flack (which is mostly deserved) of this Manufacturer does whatever crap they want with "it works" and then MS gets the complaints A driver should only be that. A driver
> A driver should only be that. A driver I still remember the massive amounts of crapware installed with video cards, printers (hello, HP), and just about anything where the manufacturer can squeeze some money from.