this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 95 points 1 month ago (25 children)

LG is starting to become indistinguishable from malware.

Their TV software includes residential proxies (your network becomes the proxy), and gets sold to AI scrapers and others. Imagine if that proxy gets used to download CSAM, used for hacking, or gets your household banned from Google?

Samsung phone software is cancer and auto installs whatever the fuck ads and games they want. They installed forced ads onto their fucking fridges.

Also worth noting Dell and Alienware do this too according to Wikipedia.

When the fuck did this become okay? We need to drive these companies out of business for this. They need to get sued for this. In what world is adding unremovable adware legal, how does that not violate the computer misuse and hacking laws?

[–] Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 44 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Things started going downhill when Lenovo wasn't fined into oblivion in the 2010s for putting malicious spyware on the laptops they sold their customers. And I mean actual literal spyware, as in "installs a root certificate and decrypts and reads all your 'secure' internet traffic, ostensibly so it can place random ads in it". While also leaving gaping holes for attackers to use, of course, but letting a random program written by someone with ties to Israeli intelligence install backdoors throughout their customer base earned Lenova slightly more money so it's all good!

And that wasn't even the first or last time Lenovo have done something like that. They just... got a free pass, and this type of thing gradually became the norm. It's infuriating.

[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 23 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yeah, I was going to post this if nobody else did. At least Sony was forced to acknowledge the issue and issue a patch. But then the patch was such a bad bodge (it didn’t even remove the rootkit, and introduced more vulnerabilities) that the punishment wasn’t anywhere near enough.

[–] Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The frustrating thing about that is how they didn't even slow down with their bullshit after that scandal, and some of the most hated DRM in recent history have a direct lineage from Sony:

  • SecuROM, a widely hated DRM that limited how many times you could install a game, required online check-ins or it'd lock you out of playing, and blocked common IT tools while running, was also developed by Sony.
  • Denuvo, which obfuscates and encrypts the game executable after scattering DRM checks throughout, adding extra CPU overhead and lowering game performance, was later produced by the same (former, now independent) SecuROM team.
[–] lemmyng@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Does Lenovo do this on Linux OS'? Cause I only saw the Lenovo crapware on Windows 10/11 before I switched to Fedora.

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