551–560 of 671 posts
They used to call this spyware/malware. Now it's a regular practice by eng. teams and managers inside these big corp. Well played guys :) Congrats with new type of tricks
If it's not malware then what is it called today?
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…
for some reason it also seems like a lot of this companion software from oems is often written by part time contract / interns.
years ago there was a classic example of iirc a logitech mouse driver that was writing the coordinate position of the mouse at ~100hz to the registry.
microsoft should be applying _at least_ app store level / whql level rigor to these, but it seems if the oem is large enough they'll just gladly yolo a 2gb package of crap onto your machine because the oem said "this our driver package"
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> Linux is great if you win the hardware support lottery. This is fairly easy to do by just not buying the absolute latest hardware. Installing something like Fedora in a 8-12 month old laptop I just can't recall last time I had issues.
I've had plenty of issues on ~2y old hardware too. Does your laptop sleep properly, do the fans scale properly, do wireless chips like Bluetooth and wifi work right, does audio (incl over BT) work, and does it switch between graphics cards if applicable?
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How exactly do you propose to sandbox drivers running in kernel space? Do you even know how drivers work? (I'm guessing no, based on this comment)
First of all, drivers don't have to run in kernel space. Do you know that? I'm guessing no, based on your comment. Second, we're not talking about the drivers per se, as those aren't what shows you ads, it's the configuration software and accompanying crapware. Did you get that? I'm guessing no, based on your comment. Third, there are capability-based kernels, microkernels, drivers that are allowed into as restricted…
No mainstream desktop OS tries very hard to sandbox drivers. Some drivers on both Windows and Linux (not very familiar with Mac) can be implemented as userspace drivers, as long as the performance hit is acceptable, but for many devices (e.g., graphics drivers), you need a kernel driver to get reasonable performance.
Therefore, if your OS supports loading 3rd party binary drivers (Windows do, Linux technically does as well, but tries to make them hard to use in practice), it cannot really refuse to load kernel drivers and only allow userspace ones without breaking a lot of machines.
Even if you have a userspace driver, the device may still get DMA access to RAM. IOMMU is a thing, but due to backwards compatibility, the driver chooses whether to enable IOMMU protection for the specific device on Windows.
If you're willing to write your own microkernel and bootstrap its driver ecosystem from scratch, your claims would be reasonable. With current desktop OS architecture, not really.
As for the accompanying software, there is a good explanation in another comment of all the valid use cases it has (printer dialogs, audio interface configuration,...). LG abusing that to show ads is primarily LG's problem.
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Just look at Microsoft’s revenue breakdown that they publish. Windows revenue is alarmingly small. I don’t think it’s a loss leader but Microsoft gets almost nothing from OEM Windows licenses and basically nobody buys it retail. This is not coming to the Linux world. The moment this sort of thing happens, distros get forked.
>This is not coming to the Linux world. The moment this sort of thing happens, distros get forked. I installed Debian 13 recently. The first time I opened Firefox ESR (installed by default), I got something that looked like adverts on the home page (banner blindness means I have no memory of what they actually were, only of the feeling of disgust). The Home section of the Settings page had options for "Sponsored shor…
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I've gotten to the point that if you're trying to show me something and I see you're using Windows, I just assume you're an unserious person and it's worthless. All the major tools for advanced work are Linux-based, and there's maybe a Windows version, but it's probably a kludge like Docker Desktop.
> All the major tools for advanced work are Linux-based No, they aren't. Linux hasn't yet got anything remotely close to PDB symbol servers and WinDbg's record-replay debugging. perf is... an attempt. Source: worked on Windows and Linux drivers and user-mode applications. Windows tooling blows the competition out of the water in actually advanced developer experience. Vim is cool to the ricing hackerman types but not…
I spent 20 years supporting Windows server and server applications like Exchange, SQL Server, IIS, etc, etc, and when I left that industry and got back to Linux, I was absolutely floored about what I had been missing. No wonder Windows had it's lunch eaten in virtually every facet by Linux server applications.
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I don't think they are anymore. The vast majority of ordinary person computer/internet use has already moved to smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and other such devices. It seems nowadays many people don't even know the basics about how to use a desktop operating system.
I find this hard to believe considering how bad the UIs are on phones and TVs. Even google.com does not offer feature parity between their desktop and mobile websites. My phone still didn't come with a functional paint or notepad apps. Google docs is a horrible experience on phones (but at least it works now - a few years ago it was straight up unusable). And you're telling me that this is the only computing platform…
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To be fair Microsoft was always shitware. I don’t remember a time when using a Windows machine just worked, didn’t take up gigabytes of space, didn’t crash, and didn’t get messed up by simply using it requiring a yearly or semi-yearly reinstall.
Windows in the 95-XP era wasn't exactly high-quality software, but it was genuine technical innovation, doing what you otherwise couldn't do.
And yeah, there was some pretty neat stuff. Of Linux, macOS and Windows, Windows was the first to get GPU crash recovery, just chugging onward after a stall instead of bringing the entire system down.
The biggest sign for me that Microsoft just doesn't care about Windows (aside from the ads stuffed everywhere after a fresh install) is they stopped caring about its bones. Where is Windows' equivalent of APFS / BTRFS (or even EXT4)..? NTFS is more than 20 years old by now.
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> but aren't even using it to block these contraptions Even worse, this one is installed via Windows update. I have an LG monitor and noticed the stupid LG app all of the sudden, uninstalled it, and saw it pop up again as an update in Windows update. Microsoft is actively enabling this behavior.
I don't understand how this is legal. Isn't this malware? Isn't it illegal to install malware on someone's computer without their permission? Or is this very illegal, but nobody cares about that anymore?
Yeah but you almost certainly granted permission to allow updates from our "Partners" when you installed windows. How did you miss clause III of romanette 2 in the 6th paragraph right in front of your face on page 26 of the ToS?