50% is a bit much. People do expect their hardware to just work. That means installing drivers and the like. And the act here is so egregious that I can't imagine being an LG engineer and living with the shame of being so incredibly despicable.
I'm disappointed with Microsoft, I'm incensed at LG.
I don't know that Microsoft is without significant blame here. They provided a mechanism for LG to do this without the necessary checks. They could just as easily make part of the WHQL process and related agreements state pretty clearly that such behaviour is forbidden and will result in anything from financial penalties to driver decertification.
If anything, as shitty as LG's behaviour is, Microsoft gave them the tools to eke out a little more money at the expense of the consumer, and a company like LG is not likely to leave that money on the table out of the goodness of their hearts. As the scorpion told the frog - "It's my character".
What part of "software needed to control a peripheral" could POSSIBLY be defined as: "software that shows you ads, and/or uploads private data to vendor without even asking for consent"?
Easy fix: freeze their developer signing accounts like they did with VeraCrypt and WireGuard, demand that they remove spyware to regain access to sign their future updates.
Or they could bundle a basic driver or police the driver they're curating while allowing people to download and install drivers directly from the vendor website with no policing, no signature checks, etc.
Distributing malware is negligent or malicious, yes. Not stopping users from seeking out their own malware is neither. Nothing stops you from running malware on Linux. The curated repos are simply good enough that there's not much reason to go looking elsewhere.
Well yeah, when you spend a significant segment of your corporate life being both negligent and an evil monopolist, people tend to assume the worst. Don't like it? Behave better.
There are more than the two bad choices for behavior here.
It's not "no matter what they do" it's really that everything they do is wrong and there really are much better alternatives than the choices they continue to make.
The difference is you can remove the LG adware without any serious downsides. Removing auto-installing drivers would have serious downsides for the average person (meaning not cyberspace experts on forums such as this).
> No, this is LG making a choice to abuse an OS feature in order to shove ads down people's throats and spy on them.
Meh, give a company something they can feasibly abuse for money, and they'll probably do that. I'm not sure that this is practically feasible on Mac or Linux; Macs enable fairly constrained but powerful userspace drivers that generally need approval, and I've never seen a piece of hardware automatically download anything that can run in the background, but that could be an anecdotal experience. Maybe printers would be the exception.
The tradeoff is that even software like Zoom doesn't completely work by default
It's getting really hard to find a solid, reputable brand of screen manufacturers that don't pull this kind of crap. I swore off Samsung screens after their popup ads in phones and TVs. LG was my next choice but this is deterring me even further.
I work at an e-waste recycling company. We get Dell monitors all the time. Their basic office monitors seem fine (~24" 1080p), but all our clients are too cheap to go for the more expensive models.
I decided I would never buy an LG monitor after mine broke and I had it shipped back three times for diag and repair. Each time it broke again soon after. They finally agreed to RMA it, but that didn’t mean a new replacement, it meant a refund, and not even for the whole price I had paid. Unfortunately the price had gone up a few hundred dollars since then, so I couldn’t even buy a replacement. This basically means they sold me a junk monitor I had to deal with for a year and then tried to get me to give them an extra $300 to roll the dice that the next one would work properly. I bought a BENQ instead, and it’s been solid.
They for a few years had 4K panels that would “blow out” in the corners over time, worse they where a panel supplier to other vendors (including Dell), of the three 4K lg monitors I had two had it happen but the last one I bought didn’t and they apparently fixed the issue at some point.
It was super annoying because their support was useless.
It put me off LG but as they do make panels for others they are hard to avoid.
That sucks. I've used an LG UltraFine 5K with my Mac Studio for years and still consider it one of my favorite tech purchases ever, so I feel lucky I've never needed their support services.
I would simply disable windows update. It always seemed insane to me that the solution to preventing RCE was to open an RCE channel to basically every provider that has installed a driver or an application on your machine.
Each auto-update is by definition remote code execution.
I've disabled Windows updates since 2017. Occasionally, I'll hit a feature I have to update for, like Windows Mixed Reality, and then pull that specific feature update. I think back in 2021 I had to update to the 2019 version of Windows 10 for that. I used uupdump to download what I needed and install it offline.
All the fiascos lately about Microsoft completely bricking and destroying systems with terrible updates just reinforce my original decision.
Note that I'm not at all hostile to updates in general. I'll update my Mac as soon as one's available, even to unstable betas, because it automatically reopens my apps and doesn't lose a bunch of state like Windows does. I'll also update my iPhone and iPad. It's really just Microsoft that I don't trust and never have.
When I got a new PC desktop, I decided to give Windows 11 a chance, and it's not bad. I hated for a while that the UI feels like just a ripoff of ChromeOS, but eventually I got used to it. I only update the minimum amount necessary when anti-cheats decide my old files are no longer trusted (looking at you, ARC Raiders).
There are cheap dongles that spoof the EDID for a fixed 4K or HD monitor with fixed settings. Not sure what they do about DCC/CI, might just disconnect it.
Keen to hear other recommendations. My DELL screen is working quite nicely but has weird burn in problems when connected through a Thunderbolt dock. What other brands (apart from the insanely priced Apple screens) still make high quality, reputable screens?
I have had good success with my dell montiors over the years. Only problem is they are not created equal, they sell to every level, entry/cheap office/gamers/high end docks/color calibrated/etc. I have stuck to the ultrasharps (and paid for it) but have been happy. Check out https://www.rtings.com/
I would totally prefer to buy something without spyware. But so far I have not found a good alternative to my 42" C-series OLED. You do have to carefully configure it to not phone home, but besides that (and some minor problems with peak brightness), it's great. If there was a non-spyware replacement, I'd buy it.
Choosing wisely doesn't prevent any given manufacturer from adding crap like this in the future. They might not push out adware today, but nothing seems to stop them from doing so in the future.
That's what makes the LG controversy uncomfortable to me: the McAfee ads were pushed out years after some owners purchased their monitors.
I have an LG monitor... and while running Linux, will definitely not be buying another... this is ridiculous. I've been weary of "smart" TVs for a long while, WTF do you need a microphone on a TV?!?
If I buy a TV and it doesn't work without connecting to the internet, I'm simply going to return it. Changing this after the fact should mean a class action lawsuit. It's ridiculous, and MS should absolutely restrict this kind of crap... They (Microsoft) auto-load the software for Logitec mice and cameras as well, but at least they (Logitech) aren't injecting ad/spyware.
I was about to comment in wonder that people deliberately download and install hardware-related craplets deliberately, which is something my parents would do. (Creative Labs used to be very bad about this.) Then I realized there's now a (MS-approved!) mechanism by which devices can just ask Windows "Hey, mind installing this silently for me?".
Best thing I've done - monitor wise - is buy a 2019 iMac 5k and convert it to work as an external display. Such a beautiful display. Only downside is once you go 5k it's very hard to go back to any lower resolution. I ended up converting a (much cheaper) 2015 iMac 5k for use in the office.
I think there's a software route you can go, but I went the hardware route. Essentially requires opening up the iMac, gutting out all the internals, and replacing it with a display driver board (from AliExpress, eBay, etc).
The display driver board has various inputs like HDMI, Thunderbolt, USB-C etc so it ends up acting like any other external monitor. It has a remote you control the brightness/contrast etc settings.
I have the same dual 32" LG setup at home and the dayjob, and have never had any issues or any requirements to install anything for them to work. That said, they're QHD, not 4k or 5k, and probably 6 years old. I'm not a gamer or a high-fidelity consumer, needing the displays to be dumb and reliable at rendering text and the web.
This is at the driver level, just like when you plugin new webcam, keyboard, gpu, etc. Windows will automatically install a default driver for that device. Now, instead of a driver, Windows will happily install some random craps that the hardware asks it to without needing any input from the users. Totally BS from Microsoft.
- Display drivers don't need access to the network
- Display drivers don't need to write to the window manager
- Display drivers just need to display the data that needs displayed
- If you sign a driver, you take responsibility for it. Else just leave people run any driver they see fit