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Asus Ships Cracking Software On Recovery DVD
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."
I suspect perhaps they already were getting fired anyhow and decided to leave behind a 'legacy' they could be remembered for.
Good thing they included their résumé in there. : p
This guy's the limit!
Was it not Windows XP, before any service packs, which came with a file in the 'My Videos' which, when opened in a text editor, showed the cracked software version used to create it?
Did anyone ever lose their jobs over that one?
I've had a look on Google but searching for "Windows pirate video" only has one or two results...
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
7zip is not superior. It's incredibly slow. I've tried 7zip many times over the past couple of years, hoping it to finally be a superior product to the needlessly expensive WinRAR ($35!), but it never happens.
.7z archives.
Uncompressing a file in WinRAR consistently takes up to or over 10x as long to uncompress in 7zip. Try it yourself. WinRAR is even faster with
I tested both products with WinXP x86, Vista Ultimate x86, and Vista Ultimate x64, all on the same 7200RPM SATA2 HDD.
Asus is a Taiwanese company. You would be surprised how common pirated software is in Taiwan. If you buy a laptop, you would expect it to come with pirated software... I was surprised when a friend of mine bought an Apple's powerbook (through a third party vendor) and it came with pirated copies vmware, photoshop, etc.
My guess would be to get rid of the nag screen? That said,I thought all the PC makers loved to put trialware on the machines to help lower their cost. Someone at Asus needs to have their resume up to date,and I hope Asus has plenty of cash on hand,because this will probably get ugly real fast. Talk about a slam dunk lawsuit.
Does anyone know if the crack is carrying a trojan? The fact that it is setting off virus scanners tells me that it might,which means if it was used on the original Asus install image there is a lot of infected machines out there. Of course simply having a folder called cracks on the CD is bad enough,but if it is also trojaned it could be REALLY costly for Asus. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Imagine my surprise when an immediate restart after driver installation off of an asus cd booted my computer into a broken version of freedos. An explanation written 4 years ago of what happened to me is here: http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/technote/211.html
i'm not completely sure, but i believe that anti-virus makers often classify keygens and cracks as viruses. it's a way of posturing to scare the public away from using these programs despite their innocuous nature.
problem is, there are some warez downloads that genuinely do contain trojans/viruses, so if your AV program is set off by a download it's difficult to know if it's a legitimate threat or simply the AV makers trying to manipulate the public.
i imagine a lot of security analysis tools (which can be used for both white hat and black hat purposes) probably set off AV programs as well.
i can see how AV software detecting warez programs might be a useful feature to businesses who want to protect themselves from lawsuits, but it should at least make a distinction between viruses/trojans/malware and warez/hacking programs which aren't harmful to the user's computer. it's not really the place of AV makers to tell users that they can't use a keygen, crack, or security tool. that's not why most people run AV programs.
> Was it not Windows XP, before any service packs, which came with a file in the 'My Videos' which, when opened in a text editor,
> showed the cracked software version used to create it?
This was apparently surprising only to people who don't work for companies that actually make it easy for developers to BUY software without having to get approval up the management chain all the way up to god himself. Half the software my co-workers and I use ends up being pirated, because our company makes it damn near impossible to buy anything that's not on the list of officially-sanctioned software (almost all of which is stuff that the "business" users need). I can blow $150 on lunch when I'm traveling without even needing to get my immediate manager to sign off an approve the reimbursement as long as I don't spend more than $250/day on meals/incidentals/entertainment, but getting reimbursed $29.95 for some shareware app I can't live without requires approval by the vice-president (my boss' boss' boss), who requires our department to submit purchase requests in batches no more than once per quarter. Of course, if we're 5 weeks into the current quarter, and I need the damn app TODAY (or at least by next week)... well... time to visit astalavista.box.sk (under vmware, of course) to get the crack and run the app (also under vmware, with write access to nothing besides a usb thumbdrive, of course).
Personally, I think 99% of free software's appeal to people who work for big, oblivious corporations is the fact that it's not just free as in beer or liberty... it's also free of bureaucratic grief.
Getting back to the Microsoft example... name any app produced by Microsoft that does something remotely close to what SoundForge does. Um, none? OK, now picture the hapless employee, who works for the largest software company on earth, dealing with THEIR bureaucracy trying to get permission to buy a program sold by one of their "competitors", even though it's a niche they don't actually compete in. Especially with a looming deadline.
Or, alternatively... picture Microsoft hiring an outside consultant/musician to do the track. To save money, they hired a freelancer who's just getting started and doesn't quite do it as his/her "real" job yet. The individual hasn't gotten to the point yet where he/she's making enough money off of it for buying it to be a no-brainer (It IS usually one of the first 3 apps anyone who becomes halfway serious about music production ends up buying when "the time comes"), and the employees at the Microsoft end responsible for getting it on the disc were themselves under immense deadline pressure. The file played, normal users aren't going to view it in a hex editor looking for anything "funny", so on the disc it went.
Sounds like a good way to frame somebody too though...
Sorry to burst your bubble,but I have actually watched keygens and cracks infect a machine. It is usually either a downloader or one of the W series viruses. From what I've seen working PC repair it isn't the cracking bunches that are infecting the machines,it is the sites that the folks get them from that are wrapping them in trojans and downloaders. But I can verify that it was the actual keygen/cracks,as I used a spare box we used for testing files and filemon and diskmon from system internals. Sure enough as the crack was activated while it did crack the program it also began writing tons of little files into system32. Those files when scanned were one of the W32 trojans. That is why I tell my users to just buy the stupid programs,as it is a lot cheaper than having to pay me to debone their box. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.