Whilst it's preaching to the choir, I would attribute 50% of the blame to Microsoft. Loading any old thing and running it is not very responsible.
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I'd argue closer 75%. Vendor abuse of this is hardly restricted to monitors, even if this is one of the more egregious cases.
Microsoft started this really. In Windows 95, they built a filing system so that applications went in specific folders in the Start menu. MS Office installed all its icons in the root of the Start menu, because self-importance. Can't expect everyone else to respect the conventions after that.
Microsoft doesn't police IHVs -> Geeks: "MS is negligent!"
Microsoft does police IHVs -> Geeks: "MS is an evil monopolist!"
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.
That is really what everyone else does. When you get the auto downloaded Nvidia driver you get only the bare basics and it's not bugging you to install the GeForce experience stuff like they do if you download it from their website.
You forgot the 3rd current option: Microsoft does police HIV, but does it poorly -> "MS is a negligent evil monopolist"
Yeah nobody who's sane is calling them negligent for being able to run random .exes
No, policing viruses is McAfee's job. :-)
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.
No, it doesn't work that way. You can't blame someone for acting badly no matter what they do - the person who does that is the one acting badly.
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.
It's called a reputation.
Poor Microsoft, what have they possibly done to deserve such lack of faith??
There's also the option of "MS asks you if you want to run stuff your monitor wants to run". It's not that hard.
The fault here is definitely LG's, though.
[x] Yes
[ ] Remind me laterYou mean [Agree] ₘₒᵣₑ ₒₚₜᵢₒₙₛ
Where more options plus a couple more clicks eventually leads you to the remind me later equivalent.
Well… they’re putting their signature on the stuff and blocking everything lacking it…
Strawman
It’s as if nothing was learned from AutoRun CDs and the like.
On the contrary, they learned to make malware authors pay them first before getting access.
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.
What a dirty, scummy move. Never buying an LG product again.
(Also a Linux user, so this doesn't affect me, but this is gross.)
I have an LG TV that I've never allowed to connect to a network, and I'm definitely keeping it that way.
>I have an LG TV that I've never allowed to connect to a network, and I'm definitely keeping it that way.
I'm starting to think that is what I need to do with my computers.
It's what you need to do to all devices whose software doesn't respect your freedoms. Whether or not your computer is part of those is a choice.
> 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
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".
> People do expect their hardware to just work. That means installing drivers and the like.
A display, of all things, shouldn't require installing anything to make it "just work." It just needs speak standardized protocols over standardized cables. That should require no more than generic drivers shipped with the operating system.
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"?
Be glad they are not mining for crypto on baked in chips with the power they draw freely.. and have some logic to circumvent power drawing measurements.
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.
Why do monitors need drivers to work?
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).
Surely Microsoft have the expertise and resources to make a platform of driver signing that separate addon software and basic driver needs?
Why should a USB headset plugged in be allowed to auto install audio software, recording software, antivirus software and adware, and not even from the device itself but fetch it from Windows Update platform) without the users consent?
Surely it would just install the needed audio driver to pass sound as signed by Microsoft, with an option for the rest?
The proposed solution to this huge issue in windows isn't to let average users fend for themselves, no one is arguing that.
That's a good middle position, but it's still not without drawbacks. The PC ecosystem has always been about Microsoft providing the OS, and a bevy of name brand vendors providing the hardware. Put Microsoft in an adversarial relationship with the hardware vendors, and the whole uneasy alliance falls apart.
Luckily, Microsoft doesn't have to do anything, and the free market is already solving this. Most people will buy hardware with annoying ads exactly once, then they'll find another alternative. This natural self-correction makes the tradeoffs above even more serious by comparison.
Over/under on the use of coinstallers as a mechanism with a "special" USB stick with a certain VID/PID pair to download a Microsoft-sanctioned "break into this machine" driver?
... to maybe go with that Yellowkey Bitlocker bypass?
Tinfoil hats, I know.