The monitors aren't installing anything. That headline was a lie.
It's Windows Update that's installing LG crapware upon seeing relevant hardware IDs. That's why the problem affected older monitors too - it's the update side that suddenly started to ship malware.
> It's Windows Update that's installing LG crapware upon seeing relevant hardware IDs
This is also a misrepresentation. Microsoft has provided LG with a certificate to sign its driver packages with, and allows LG to upload packages to Windows Update, which includes a feature to install sidecar applications. Now, the spirit of this feature is that any application is meant to provide genuine configuration functionality or some graphical front end to the driver's configuration knobs.
LG then abused that feature to provide adware. Now, there are millions of hardware vendors. One can't expect that every driver package submission from every vendor is thoroughly vetted every time, this is a matter of trust and respect.
Sometimes one actually wants the app that comes with the device, like AMD's and NVIDIA's configuration trays.
Even so, I fully expect that after this debacle MS will disable this stuff. There is precedent for this. Synaptics/ELAN/Alps touchpad tray applications largely disappeared after MS implemented precision touchpads somewhere in 2015, and suddenly Windows touchpads became as precise as those on Macs. Likewise with RGB peripherals. Even GPU driver applications have increasingly become less useful as the most important features—power control, adaptive sync, HDR, etc have moved into native Windows settings.
Because at scale, that doesn't work, I think, even money no object, because it's a task that requires a lot of domain knowledge, but also is monotonous and offers little in the way of satisfaction or looking good on your resume, so the candidates you're trying to hire aren't very junior, and also are not going to like the work.
Why not? "At scale" is not an argument on its own. This is something where scale helps you because the number of different hardware you need to support is independent from the size of your customer base.
And if you really can't act responsibly "at scale" then you shouldn't be allowed that scale.
IIRC, at least 15 years ago, that's exactly what they did. They published a tool suite that your driver should pass before submission because otherwise it would fail when they got to it. I think the submissions were fully automated by that time.
> One can't expect that every driver package submission from every vendor is thoroughly vetted every time, this is a matter of trust and respect.
Maybe not, but LG has violated this trust and should therefore be either fined or severely restricted by Microsoft. Banning will likely cause more problems than solutions, but they shouldn't get away with this.
Adware was a huge problem during the Windows XP era, can't believe it's coming back now through Microsoft's official channels.
Also I doubt there's actually millions of hardware vendors. But that aside, Microsoft has a duty to vet everything that they offer through their channels. If it's too expensive for them to do, do like Apple did and have those that want to make use of their distribution network (and trust) pay them.
> I doubt there's actually millions of hardware vendors.
Almost certainly correct because there are only 2^16 USB manufacturer IDs, of which (warning, Google AI quick result...) only 3400 are used. Tiny vendors of e.g. USB drives often seem to use the vendor and device ID of the interface chip manufacturer, but that's probably a good filter for really unimportant ones. Of course not every device has USB, but most major hardware vendors implement USB somewhere and have an official USB vendor ID.
> after MS implemented precision touchpads somewhere in 2015, and suddenly Windows touchpads became as precise as those on Macs.
There’s still a world of difference between a MacBook touchpad and a windows one. My work laptop (18 month old dell XPS) can’t hold a candle to my 6 year old MacBook’s trackpad.
> Likewise with RGB peripherals. Even GPU driver applications have increasingly become less useful as the most important features—power control, adaptive sync, HDR, etc have moved into native Windows settings.
The peripherals still need the addons though; I have ASUS armory crate, Corsair iCue and MSI center for my Motherboard, cooler and GPU respectively. They all suck.
> There’s still a world of difference between a MacBook touchpad and a windows one. My work laptop (18 month old dell XPS) can’t hold a candle to my 6 year old MacBook’s trackpad.
The latest Dell trackpads are quite bad. Price or the product being premium or not unfortunately does not tell you if it will have a good trackpad or not. And it changes over time (Dell XPS used to have really good trackpads)
Basically you have to go to a store and try or find reviews that actually pay attention to this.
> There’s still a world of difference between a MacBook touchpad and a windows one
Oddly I've found otherwise (Dell Precision notebook from 2021, and Surface Laptop). It might be macOS's animations and smoothing interfering here, but I've found that my Windows touchpads are much more responsive, especially when swiping between desktops.
> The peripherals still need the addons though
Ugh, this is annoying. Hardware vendors need to be banned from writing lousy, inefficient, unsafe software.
On the trackpads - I only ever use my MacBook as a single screen device, so the experience may be different. A long time ago I used it with an external monitor and the experience was very poor compared to windows.
> Ugh, this is annoying. Hardware vendors need to be banned from writing lousy, inefficient, unsafe software.
Yeah, I commented on the McAfee LG thread but the stuff that comes bundled with hardware is embarassing. I don’t know how Razer, Logitech, nvidia, MSI, asus, etc get away with it. The stuff is awful, even their “good” software. I work in games and a few years ago the biggest correlation we had between unexplained crashes/performance problems in the wild was users having MSI Afterburner installed. Users thought it did great things and fixed a bunch of games but it absolutely thrashed everything we worked very hard to do and caused no end of issues doing so.
> Yeah, I commented on the McAfee LG thread but the stuff that comes bundled with hardware is embarassing. I don’t know how Razer, Logitech, nvidia, MSI, asus, etc get away with it. The stuff is awful, even their “good” software.
Well, this is the whole market on its own. It's entrepreneurship. No different than every web SaaS startup trying to capture some entry-level piece of computer use and then constrain it so it interoperates only with their "net of trusted partners".
They get away with it because everyone is happy and making money - the users, notably, are not part of the group here, and have no voice. The users are resources to be exploited. Same as on the web, and on most markets these days.
My point is not to shift the blame to Microsoft; it's primarily LG that's at fault here.
My point here is simply that it's not the monitor that is installing this. Neither the malware nor the URLs to malware exist on the device - they get fetched as part of normal OS-side auto-provisioning, which is the part that was compromised.
This is a primary LG fault, however I would say that Microsoft also has a fair bit of blame here.
They are downloading and installing something without the users consent.
It's nice to have drivers work without any intervention, same with "helper software" but along side the ease of use they also took on the responsibility.
If I download some random .exe from the net; I have to confirm that I want to run it, sometimes I even have to right click and unblock it to allow it to run, because it is "untrusted".
Their signature key, their auto-run system, everything done for ease of use means they own this.
Yes, and it's only possible thanks but no thanks to MicroSlop.
And it's not like MS is too poor to do anything useful for their customers. They just don't want to unless the cost-benefit analysis pans out in their favor. The customer is worth as much as their wallet.
I can only imagine the meetings at microsoft HQ where they all sat around a table and crossed their fingers and hoped that vendors would act in the spirit of their design.
> One can't expect that every driver package submission from every vendor is thoroughly vetted every time, this is a matter of trust and respect.
If you're going to allow 3rd parties to install software on potentially billions of computers with far reaching privileges then you better have something in place other than 'just trust me bro'.
Why's that? "Just trust me bro" is the security model of all closed source, proprietary software. OMG, the program with secret source code is doing shady stuff? I'm shocked - shocked!
Hard to get worked up over "3rd parties" when even 1st parties cheerfully stomp all over the interests of their users. That ship sailed, caught fire, and sank to the bottom of the ocean the day Candy Crush appeared in the goddamned Start menu.
The situation is very different on Macs. Apple control almost the entire hardware stack of the machines that macOS runs on. They make it an absolute pain in the neck to run any application not blessed by attestation. This attestation server is also frequently offline. They've also made it very difficult to write things like filesystem drivers, having completely pulled that functionality from more recent versions of macOS. In fact, if I recall correctly one cannot ship a third-party kext on more recent Macs, especially ARM ones. As such, hackintoshing has basically vanished as a hobby.
At least on Windows, the most you get is a scare screen saying 'this app is from an unidentified developer'. I know what I'd rather have.
I would say it's neither a lie nor misinformed. It 's a punchier headline that can be justified by what the user experiences. The user connects a monitor which causes ads to appear. The rest of this Rube Goldberg contraption is a mere detail.
I disagree. It matters that LG makes ads appear on their customers' screens as a deterministic consequence of connecting one of their monitors. It's not superstition.
Of course the details are important on some level. But that doesn't make everything else not matter and it doesn't turn an incomplete explanation into a lie.
That's my point: it's not a consequence of connecting a monitor. An external element is making it look like such.
This difference tells you that, for example, you cannot fix the problem by fixing the monitor, because the problem does not exist in hardware. It's actually entirely external to the hardware you own, because it exists entirely "in the cloud" (i.e. on MS and LG servers).
The headline isn't a lie, even if you can technically nitpick it.
The manufacturer implemented choices to deliberately install the software when the monitors are connected. The mechanism is not important to why this is outrageous.
Wait, you're saying a monitor can just advertise a URL over the video connection for its driver and then Windows will blindly install it, without user confirmation? I thought that LG had submitted these "drivers" (adware) to Microsoft and they approved it.
As far as I'm aware, the monitor does not transmit a URL. Windows is looking at the hardware's vendor and device IDs and using those to look up and download the "drivers" that LG has stated are for that device.
2. Windows Update runs automatically and not (usually) manually
3. Automatic update can't even be disabled, only manually postponed a bit
At least 2 and 3 are different on virtually every Linux distro. Also, I find it very unlikely that they would accept such behavior.
To give MS the benefit of the doubt here, now that this happened and has been reported on they might decide to enforce stricter rules on manufacturers in the future. But as a Windows user you don't have a choice in case you don't like how they decide and how their decisions might change again later.
I believe you register your device with Microsoft so Windows can automatically obtain and install drivers for them when they are plugged in.
What LG sent in for installation is not a simple .inf or .sys/.dll file. They sent in a whole bag of software which does all the nasty things, and Microsoft doesn't vet or care about the software installed as the "driver" of the hardware.
This is actually a feature of the .inf by design, an AddSoftware directive. It can even link to apps from the store instead of bundling them with the driver. This is designed to install settings panels like the ones for GPUs.
I guess that from Microsoft's perspective, the driver itself wasn't suspicious, but it installs a questionable sidecar app they would have never vetted anyway.
But in a Plug-and-Play world, its addition is noticed by the operating system -- as has been normal for decades.
Microsoft's Windows operating system sees this new hardware ID and then goes forth to install whatever-the-fuck software it associates with that identification, presumably as a service to the user. (Did Microsoft approve it? Dunno. I'm just over hear eating popcorn.)
That's an excellent and terrific point. In this way, the dichotomy between Windows and Linux can be as if they're just two sides of the same "vetted" coin.
I would say 95%+ do just this. The Debian, Ubuntu, and even Fedora repos are very large and include all the software you could ever want. And then flathub takes the rest.
It’s really only arch with the AUR and some others where completely untrusted packages are used. This is legitimately a better model than what windows does, although Microsoft has been trying to change this with winget.
> Increasingly software is distributed by "curl dodgysite.com/get.sh|sudo bash -"
I don't think this is the norm at all. I have seen curl/bash install scripts for tools like Claude Code, but they don't use sudo, and the expectation is that you deploy them in isolated user accounts or containers.
Paste that in the macOS Terminal, a Linux shell or WSL. The script explains what it will do and then pauses before it does it. Read about other installation options.
== k3s ==
K3s provides an installation script that is a convenient way to install it as a service on systemd or openrc based systems. This script is available at https://get.k3s.io. To install K3s using this method, just run:
These scripts have lines like
> abort "Need sudo access on macOS (e.g. the user ${USER} needs to be an Administrator)!"
> the expectation is that you deploy them in isolated user accounts or containers.
Why are you lying right now? This is a norm across the dev tools world for businesses to distribute dodgy curl piped to bash scripts that users install without question, popular examples: homebrew, docker, nvm, bun, deno, k3s. There is zero "expectation" given by any of these install scripts that they are isolated. Can you even find a single source online that suggests doing what you said for you to think its a commonly held expectation?
There is one major difference: those install under your users. I haven’t seen a windows installer that didn’t require admin. Some older Linux apps require sudo. They don’t need to do that anymore, not for a while. We have xdg standards of where to install stuff in a users home directory.
The last time I used Windows seriously, which was Windows 10, this was not the case. If that's changed then great. But we need to acknowledge that Windows software install is changing to become more Linux-ified. With package managers and repos out of the box.
Clearly the Linux model is more secure, and Microsoft knows it. It's a good idea for Microsoft to take inspiration here. It's only a matter of time before they do containerization too, ala Flatpak. The biggest hurdle to that is Windows doesn't have native containers and the entire container ecosystem is build around Linux.
If Microsoft wanted my advice, which they don't, I think it would cost less at this point to just make Windows a Linux distro. Wine is already better at running older Windows software than Windows. Just expand Wine a bit, add in acceleration where it doesn't already exist, and boom you're done. Nobody would even notice.
And maybe then Windows on ARM wouldn't suck so much.
> The last time I used Windows seriously, which was Windows 10, this was not the case.
Apps like Chrome and Spotify have been doing it for almost 20 years, since they made their Windows apps back in 2008. Python updated their installer to install to the user profile in 2015 with version 3.5.0. VSCode started doing it in 2018. Discord did it at launch in 2015. Zoom and Teams and Slack do it and have for a long time. Its been a pretty common pattern for a long time.
> Windows doesn't have native containers
Windows supports Windows containers natively and has supported Windows containers for a decade.
> maybe then Windows on ARM wouldn't suck so much.
Windows on Arm these days really isn't bad. It definitely sucked a lot several years ago with tons of compatibility issues (along the timeframe you said you last used it seriously), but they've made massive improvements since.
It is such glaring security hole that there was an old submission about filling such install script with `sleep` commands and detecting it on server side, to send different versions for downloading (and reviewing) and for actual direct execution.
Famously, the Linux kernel does not have a stable ABI for drivers. As a result, by far the majority of drivers are in-tree, maintained by the kernel folks as part of the kernel.
The Linux approach has the downside of not having the drivers if a vendor has not been working with the kernel community before launch (or for those who haven't upgraded to a kernel that has the driver, e.g. a LTS release).
On the other hand, the driver is maintained by kernel developers, not created by the hardware developer who is not getting paid after they sell the device. This helps avoid abandoned / vulnerable drivers, or having the hardware dev search for... alternative revenue streams, as in this case.
If you're trying to say that Microsoft implemented a method of delivering specifically malware executables to every PC, I've got a bridge to sell to you.
No, what I'm saying is that Linux isn't safer simply because "it's not relevant enough to be targeted", it's safer because it doesn't offer mechanisms which could be abused to do this.
Nobody is diminishing LG's blame, LG is guilty of installing malware, and Microsoft is guilty of being grossly negligent and facilitating it. Microsoft implemented this feature knowing that it would eventually be abused for something like this, and it's bad enough to be indistinguishable from malice.
Linux's 'security model’ has plenty of holes. The very fact the kernel and much of its user-mode is written in C almost guarantees that its security model is worthless. The Linux ecosystem operates on trust and respect that can and has been easily abused by bad actors to provide supply-chain pwnage.
There have been so many zero-click local privilege escalation CVEs I've lost track.
AUR is an effectively unmoderated user repo. It’s not Arch Linux’s core repository, nor is it enabled by default or indeed even possible to use without manual downloads from outside the package manager.
You have confidence you are actually downloading the same foo as everyone else. And if there were an issue there would be pushback. Not so if you get some random exe from warez.com
Yes it isn't perfect, it's still a lot better than windows land.
I think you can probably find a better example, even if less recent. The AUR is unofficial and not properly vetted in the same way as the actual Arch repos, Debian repos, etc.
Implementation bugs are not holes in the security model. Linux has plenty of those, as does Windows.
Windows security model trusts, downloads, and immediately executes arbitrary software when a new untrusted device is plugged in, without asking the user.
I guess with more and more consumer devices running Linux based OSes (SteamOS, Android, Bazzite, Silverblue, ..) that becomes more and more interesting.
And unfortunately the "I'm safe on my non-windows-system" argument doesn't count for long, as the 99% muggle crowd justifies a shift to a world where our non-certified (=> 'insecure') systems are not supported by big companies anymore, as it's currently happening on Android.
It's Windows Update that's installing LG crapware upon seeing relevant hardware IDs. That's why the problem affected older monitors too - it's the update side that suddenly started to ship malware.