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.
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
Fyi Microsoft did not respond for comments
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.
They get a cut, then.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
for once i’m not blaming microsoft for adware
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.
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.
Nice and buried so the usual end users never find that setting.
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.
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.
That’s insane it’s buried so deep in the settings. I get why, but that’s terrible
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.
So LG is on the list of never buy again…good to know…
Pity, they used to make good shit…
I am worried that soon we will need a “decent enough to buy” list because it will be difficult to find anything that is not on the “never buy again” list.
There are only a few companies that make the actual panels (regardless of how the finished TV or monitor was branded), and two of the biggest (LG and Samsung) are the worst offenders in terms of enshittification. It would not take much at all for the availability of new non-enshittified TVs and computer monitors to drop to literally zero.
Seriously. I have an old LG plasma TV that I was planning to replace with an LG, but definitely not now.
I bought an LG TV last year. I has never been online and never will be. It gets served through a streaming box and that’s all the info it gets.
The problem was you could do the right thing of keeping it offline, but that it used Windows to install unwanted software. Of course, solution is install Linux, but for the average user who decides to hook up their laptop and is using Windows they’d end up with unpleasant software installed.
And it affected LG monitors too, which means Windows PC users were affected.
Realize that we’re talking apples and oranges here (PC monitor vs TV). I was responding to someone about their invasive TV practices.
I’m lazy and curmudgeonly on my PC, so it’s running an IoT version of Windows 10 LTSC. No such shenanigans here. For now.
Same. I have no complaints about mine whatsoever.
I’m not sure there are any TV manufacturers that won’t try to fill your screen with ads and track what you’re watching, you just need to make sure your TV can’t access the internet.
That isnt enough since even dumb displays like LG monitors used Windows itself to install unwanted software on people’s PCs. Would have to actually disable that setting in Windows or use Linux.
Sceptre makes dumb panels still, limited range of options but better than being spied on if you just need a replacement screen.
Microsoft responds to accusations that they are selling back door access to their OS, by issuing a vague and obtuse statement, that kind of maybe says that they asked the offenders to stop making the back door’s existence so glaringly obvious.
I was trying to figure out why someone would install a third party driver for a monitor, of all things, and then I read this
Further, Microsoft allows Universal Windows Platform device apps “to automatically install when the user connects their device to the PC”
Is this for real? Does it at least prompt with a pop-up first?
Let me guess…
Users never read prompts, so we have removed them
Kinda like
Users never update, so we have forced that
I mean, I get forcing users to update.
If you could have nothing but pure intentions… that’s still a bad way to go about getting users to update. Users choose to not update to avoid getting fucked by Microslop.
Users choose not to update to avoid rebooting. The average user barely even knows what an OS is. They just know that if they reboot, they’ll lose their 347 Emotional Support Chrome tabs. Lemmy tends to be fairly tech literate, which means conversations about tech often involve the Average Familiarity problem:
Emotional Support Chrome tabs is my new favorite thing of the day
Chrome (and Firefox and probably every other major browser) has reopened tabs on restart for years now.
Other programs, not so much. Windows did add the feature to reopen programs fairly recently, but most of the time that means just starting the program, not actually restoring your session.
XKCD 2501 is second nature to us internauts so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows XKCD 1053 (Ten Thousand) and XKCD 386 (Duty Calls).
No. It’s supposed to be for essential device drivers, and companions apps like webcam image control.
It does not prompt it just does it in the background along with the driver install when you first plug it in
That’s a bunch of words, but they don’t really answer your question about why a monitor needs 3rd party drivers.
Display Port has fancy features like Display Stream Compression where the driver compresses the image going to the screen.
The solution would be for MS to move those features into Windows rather than allow manufacturers flexibility in implementation. MS would get bad publicity for monopoly and then have to deal with fixing Windows for every off brand monitor because the manufacturer didn’t follow the standard exactly.
Long time Linux user here.
Microsoft would fuck up their implementation of the standard, monitors would all be designed around Microsoft bugs and then OSs that implement the standard correctly have to break their stuff so that Windows monitors will work.
My Linux does not do this shit. get rekt MS and LG.
Good reason not to use LG or Windows.
