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Asus Ships Cracking Software On Recovery DVD

Posted by timothy on from the cold-sweat-in-taiwan dept.

Barence writes "Asus is accidentally shipping software crackers and confidential documents on the recovery DVDs that come with its laptops. The startling discovery was made by a PC Pro reader whose antivirus software was triggered by a key cracker for the WinRAR compression software, which was located on the recovery DVD for his Asus laptop. Along with the key cracker the disc also contained confidential Asus documents including a PowerPoint presentation that details 'major problems' identified by the company, including application compatibility issues. The UK reader is not alone, either — several users in the US and Australia have also found suspicious files on Asus discs."

7 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. Cracking WinRAR is lame by Spatial · · Score: 3, Informative

    WinRAR is free to use, last time I checked it only asked you to buy it through a brief, unintrusive nag window. Cracking it is really damn lame.

    1. Re:Cracking WinRAR is lame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      I think the tool is actually for extracting the passwords for any protected archives created with the WinRAR application...

    2. Re:Cracking WinRAR is lame by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Informative

      IZarc is also free (beer not speech). I use it on all the systems I have. I love it.

  2. Re:WinRAR by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    Which, for the benefit of those who have never used 7-Zip, fully supports unpacking RAR archives out of the box without having to have unrar or WinRAR at all.

    Now if you want to make RAR files, then you'll need rar or WinRAR. But also you should note that 7-Zip's native 7z format gets rather better compression than RAR. ;)

    --
    My blog
  3. Re:Someone Is Getting Fired by Skrynesaver · · Score: 5, Informative
    It was in the wav files used in the XP tour introduction thinghy

    LISTB INFOICRD 2000-04-06 IENG Deepz0ne ISFT Sound Forge 4.5

    Was present in the files, a sign that a pirated version of Sound Forge from Deepz0ne of the Radium warez crew.

    --
    "Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
  4. Re:WinRAR by Benanov · · Score: 3, Informative

    7zip has a good UI *if* you mainly use the shell integration features (enabled by default.)

    7zip is also FSF-Free minus unrar.dll, whereas WinRAR has very restrictive licensing terms.

  5. Because they're BSA members, of course. by Xenographic · · Score: 4, Informative

    I know you're joking, but for anyone who doesn't get the joke, Microsoft is a BSA member.

    They only terrorize small businesses.