So, this won't work on any regular bike that has a fender, which is most 'regular' bikes people would use for city-driving/daily commutes. (At least in area's that get rain occasionally.
Honestly I don't really see this as a bad thing for the average person. I don't register my domains with CloudFlare, but I do all my DNS through them and it's great.
Everything propagates in 10 seconds rather than 10 hours.
This is nothing new. For about 30 years now Microsoft has been constantly repeating various flavors of this “make it so a thing can automatically and silently run programs as soon as it touches your computer” thing. It’s always done in the name of user convenience. It always ends up being a fiasco. I don’t know why they keep doing it, it’s not like the exact same PHB keeps making the same decision over and over for 30 years. It’s probably one or a combination of the many well documented flavors of stupid that are deeply baked into the company’s organizational culture.
(And before the inevitable response, no this is not defending Microsoft. Pointing out that an organization’s culture is too deeply, chronically stupid to avoid opening the exact same obvious and gaping security hole over and over and over and over again is not the same as saying, “it’s fine, actually.”)
> It’s probably one or a combination of the many well documented flavors of stupid that are deeply baked into the company’s organizational culture.
It all comes from the increasingly widely held idea that the user should not be the ultimate authority over what should run on his computer. The OS vendor should have a say. Third party developers should have a say. Device manufacturers should have a say. Anyone except the user, who is just a passenger on his own system. And this mentality is not limited to Microsoft.
> I can only conclude that Windows is basically malware now...
Windows has worked like spyware since what, the late Windows 7 days or thereabout?
End users should not regard this as inevitable. Or get caught up in the how-it-works-how-to-disable swamp. Instead, cut through to the essence. It's about respect:
# Microsoft does not respect Windows users (or users of any of their offerings?).
# LG does not respect people who buy their monitors (and perhaps other products?).
Knowing that, why would you use such a sleazy company's product for daily driving? Or give them your money? Would you buy bread from a baker who pisses on your lawn every time you're not looking?
User rights or consumer protection laws aren't even part of this equation. Although they do help (sometimes a lot!) to keep companies honest.
It should be a choice. They were or nearly were convicted for being a monopoly. For most users, they're not even aware there's a hardware/software distiction.
MS-Windows GUI has cashed on this unawareness since 95. "My Computer", "The computer needs to restart"... Being deliberately incorrect to add to the existing confusion.
How it it a Windows issue that driver developers pack garbage with their drivers? If Linux supported loading 3rd party drivers (it mostly doesn't, and if Windows did that, the whole internet would be up in arms about Microsoft locking down their OS), it would have exactly the same issues.
This is basically the same as downloading a program, running it and when it downloads garbage on your computer, complaining that Windows are dumb for allowing a program to download garbage.
I wonder if this ritual of meta-self-policing serves some particular purpose or if it's just a case of the brain drawing comfort from going through a familiar ritual. "This comment adds nothing" is like the reverse amen in church of our days.
It confirms for me that I too made the right choice and it reminds people that haven't made the jump yet that they have a choice in how their operating system treats them. I'd say it added a lot more than your comment.
Why do people even install 'drivers' for things like monitors. (Or usb devices running 'standard' protocols). The OS handles these just fine by itself.
Indeed, our Windows 11 offline Steam box also needed to disable LG & Switch App in taskmanager, and set LG apps to manual start in Services.
Apparently the 3 applications have some sort of screen partitioning/sharing capabilities, but it is still unclear if the LG App was remote access or not.
So far, LG is earning a lot of justified bad press. Should have returned it when I had to turn off the screens power-save mode to get it to stop fading out randomly. =3
The article is about people NOT installing it but getting it installed anyway :)
As to why people do install such software? It sometimes provides additional features, controls and settings. For example with touchpad you could set the sensitivity, hot corners, set the scroll behaviour the way you like it, etc.
With monitors you might get a better colour profile (P3 instead of just sRGB), I don't know. I don't use monitors like this.
I don't see any details in any of the texts I came across, but in theory the implementation could be that Windows sees the ID of the monitor once connected through any sort of connection, then when matching ID is found it installs the malware. Rather than the installer is sent from the monitor to the computer. Would make updates a lot easier, and if they really want to spread this malware, can activate it for a lot more monitors.
Most commercial solutions are Windows-based and use the Windows API. HDMI and DP also have two-way communication channels. This is something you learn when you do hardware coding.(Of course you already know this, but this is for the other people reading this comment.)
Typically, the Windows update server downloads packages mapped to hardware IDs in the background. Since LG's business in Korea has been failing and their AI efforts are stagnating, they exploited their McAfee partnership marketing as a pipeline. Windows' Plug and Play does make development convenient. The DX experience is good.
Linux is quite fragmented. That's good from a 'my computer' perspective, but not from a 'product' perspective. And then there's the jitter issue. Windows has stable paid solutions, while Linux has version discrepancies.
In fact, the reason Linux is considered secure is simply because hardware vendors haven't standardized enough to build automatic deployment pipelines.
In programming terms, we all know singleton is bad, but for Plug and Play, it's overwhelmingly convenient.
> In fact, the reason Linux is considered secure is simply because hardware vendors haven't standardized enough to build automatic deployment pipelines.
The Linux security model (sudo to install or update software) doesn't allow this. No reputable distribution would include a program that scans hardware identifiers and prompts the user for permission to install proprietary software from a third-party source. This is possible on Windows because of the "universal backdoor," aka Windows Update, with Microsoft's consent.
> simply because hardware vendors haven't standardized enough to build automatic deployment pipelines
Wouldn't it require cooperation from the distros anyway? You say "HDMI and DP also have two-way communication channels", but that doesn't force the OS to communicate over those channels. And it also doesn't force the "mapping of packages to hardware IDs" to be what the hardware manufacturer wants it to be.
Your point is idealistically correct, but realistically it's not. Because when people install Windows, they don't want to go through the process of installing drivers for other hardware devices. And usually the driver versions depend on the OS version too.
Right away, with numerous distributions like Ubuntu and Arch, it's hard to account for all the possible cases from a production standpoint. But Windows has very few versions. As long as you pass Microsoft's standard specification, it just runs on Windows. That difference is huge. What you're saying is ideal, but when selling a product, time is money.
In other words, to summarize our conversation:
'As you said, separating them is the right thing to do. But UX Uesrs basically wanted that kind of deployment authority, and in the process, the problem of abusing it arose.'
It's a beginner level problem, but at the same time, it's also a difficult one.
That makes some sense to me, I think for some reason my brain assumed they were like actively controlling the PC to download things other than updates, (and low key assumed part of this update was supposed to be for software on the monitor not the desktop)
The monitor itself isn't installing anything, Windows detects the device by unique ID, and uses Windows Update to get the driver which itself triggers a Windows Store application (malware) to install.
The monitor only sends a unique device ID, everything else is handled by Windows.
We have an offline account Windows 11 Steam box, and the stupid popup still hit our machine a few days back. It did ask for screen access (said no), but there is no obvious button to opt out of the adware popups (select don't show, and click X to close).
Disabled LG & Switch App in taskmanager auto start, and set to Manual for all 3 LG process names in Services.
A lot of bad karma, for such an buggy monitor that doesn't even work properly till you turn off the silly power-saver auto-dim mode. =3
Noticed in my monitoring that my cronjobs were failing, still have some validity on my certs, but this has been down for a few days in a row now.