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.
Took them long enough.
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
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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.
Thanks Steve from gamer nexus to put a spot on this atrocities
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.
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.
Fyi Microsoft did not respond for comments
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
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 this was a significant non answer. “We want to sound like we’re doing something without doing anything”
“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
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Switching operating system is cheaper…
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.
Great, add it to the list of hundreds of others.
My understanding is that LG broke the TOS and Microsoft asked them to stop instead of penalizing them under the agreement they broke. They wouldn’t do this for the average consumer and so the average consumer should jump ship to something else.
…like linux. and then be done with all this shit.
If a company is doing something malicious to it’s customers isn’t there a thing already to deal with that company and protect the customers? Thought it was called the government and it exists only because the said customers pay like half of their income for that government thing to protect them.
You’ve mistaken this for a working democracy with proper consumer protections and actionable laws.
But yeah. Thats how it’s supposed to work.
They get a cut, then.
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.
Probably reliable until the next “feature and experience update” where they move or remove the setting and default it back to allow for all users again and all the soulless advertisers cum their pants because their malware delivered impression counts just went up again
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.
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.
