When you turn on your PC and notice that there’s a huge Christmas banner on your desktop, do not panic – your device is not compromised.
Hah, well a vendor just pushed unapproved executable to the device and ran it without consent. Under any definition or other context it's definitely compromised.
Who green lit this? I really hope that person gets fired immediately.
The lack of any visual link to ASUS isn't even the biggest problem for me; it's that ASUS rolls out a program that (presumably) puts itself in autostart by default and just pops up without prompt at all.
Edit: There's a fucking setting in the BIOS to auto-install ASUS' bullshit software? And it's enabled by default.... jesus fucking christ
I'd love to know if this was just some guy who went 'let's ship it to all our customers!' or if this was a C-level 300 hours of meetings type of thing which concluded that spreading christmas malware cheer was the right move.
Why don't every vendor with an installed app make a similar banner?
It would be so festive, and I bet people would love it, to have 20 or 30 such occurrences every time you need to use your computer during holidays.
It would of course be optimal if each has an animation and a tune, that need to finish before you can escape.
Weird that only Asus had this brilliant idea? It's so awesome when you are not in control of what happens on your computer.
/s
If you want to take back control, Linux is your best option.
I find it difficult to choose a motherboard because they all look shady. aSUS should be criticized for creating a bad app and installing it without consent but I feel like this could have been any other motherboard manufacture.
And again, don't have to deal with this corporate nonsense on my Linux machine. Maybe at work just ask IT to switch your machine to Linux. They likely won't, but if enough people complain and ask, they might actually start thinking about using sane systems
Make no mistake, they will backpedal and apologize, but this was a flex. They want the public to know that their machines are fucking pwnt from top to bottom and they shouldn’t try any funny shit.
Yeah, when I saw that shit I had a mini heart attack. Opened up process explorer to identify what was running. Found it was Asus and basically said "huh, how are you still here - delete"