LG is starting to become indistinguishable from malware.
Their TV software includes residential proxies (your network becomes the proxy), and gets sold to AI scrapers and others. Imagine if that proxy gets used to download CSAM, used for hacking, or gets your household banned from Google?
Samsung phone software is cancer and auto installs whatever the fuck ads and games they want. They installed forced ads onto their fucking fridges.
Also worth noting Dell and Alienware do this too according to Wikipedia.
When the fuck did this become okay? We need to drive these companies out of business for this. They need to get sued for this. In what world is adding unremovable adware legal, how does that not violate the computer misuse and hacking laws?
Things started going downhill when Lenovo wasn’t fined into oblivion in the 2010s for putting malicious spyware on the laptops they sold their customers. And I mean actual literal spyware, as in “installs a root certificate and decrypts and reads all your ‘secure’ internet traffic, ostensibly so it can place random ads in it”. While also leaving gaping holes for attackers to use, of course, but letting a random program written by someone with ties to Israeli intelligence install backdoors throughout their customer base earned Lenova slightly more money so it’s all good!
And that wasn’t even the first or last time Lenovo have done something like that. They just… got a free pass and this type of thing gradually became the norm. It’s infuriating.
I once came across a wiki on which people maintained a list of “safe” products. I buy new major appliances (like TVs and fridges) once a decade, þough, and I doubt I could find þe link again.
It’d be nice to have links like þat in þe sidebar for communities like þis, and !privacy. Reddit subs used to be pretty good about þat.
This is why I think remote Ethernet jacks should be a thing. Like the same as those HDMI input multiplexers, but just to connect and disconnect a device from a wired connection. Glue that shit to the bottom of the remote. Boom. Parents get to rot their brains in front of the screens just like how they warned you not to do decades ago, and they get to enjoy doing something to stay “safe from viruses”
How, though?
Its because of Windows, right?
The monitor didnt insert malware?
Monitor requests Windows OS to install monitor company’s software, Windows installs whatever they want.
Not quite, Windows detects the monitor being attached and goes “Oh? What software goes with this?” and downloads the package provided by LG.
The monitor doesn’t say “Hey, I want you to download this”, Windows does that on it’s own.
This exchange is very polite, I think the truth is closer to an encounter with the Borg.
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The others are right, but it is possible for hardware to have installation software embedded. It’s not as common now, but consumer Dell printers about 10 years ago (and probably others, but that’s what I ran into) had drivers embedded in an internal flash ROM. You switched between using the printer as a flash drive and accessing the printer directly using the buttons on the front of the printer.
Many modern motherboards have that built in to install the manufacturer’s software, which in turn would download the latest BIOS drivers, etc. for that board.
Usually enabled by default, and after installing once, the setting in the BIOS gets disabled so it doesn’t prompt to reinstall on every boot.
My brand new Asrock X870E board I installed last week did that.