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Asus Ships Eee PCs With Malware
An anonymous reader writes "'According to an email sent out by Asus, PC Advisor reports, the Eee Box's 80GB hard drive has the recycled.exe virus files hidden in the drive's D: partition. When the drive is opened, the virus activates and attempts to infect the C: drive and any removable drives connected to the system.'"
get Vista to run on that thing?
I guess it means they found a way to cram Vista onto it ...
D:
No, Windows is not a virus. Here's what viruses do:
* They replicate quickly - okay, Windows does that.
* Viruses use up valuable system resources, slowing down the system as they do so - okay, Windows does that.
* Viruses will, from time to time, trash your hard disk - okay, Windows does that too.
* Viruses are usually carried, unknown to the user, along with valuable programs and systems. Sigh... Windows does that, too.
* Viruses will occasionally make the user suspect their system is too slow (see 2) and the user will buy new hardware. Yup, that's with Windows, too.
Until now it seems Windows is a virus but there are fundamental differences:Viruses are well supported by their authors, are running on most systems, their program code is fast, compact and efficient and they tend to become more sophisticated as they mature.
So Windows is not a virus.
It's a bug.
...then maybe this wouldn't have happened?
Take a great concept- the netbook... a small, light, inexpensive, flash-based, long-battery life, Linux based system. Then ruin it by making it a large, heavier, expensive, hard-drive based, medium battery life, MS-Windows based system.
Oh well. I guess some people didn't "get it".
Quoting TFA:
According to Symantec, the malware is likely to be the W32/Usbalex worm, which creates an autorun.inf file to trigger recycled.exe from D:
The real bug is any O/S stupid enough to be designed to automatically execute things on media when loaded. That's a remarkably stupid design.
This particular viral infestation doesn't look all that harmful; but it is really, really hard to feel good about the overall integrity of the system when things like this are happening. In fact, the fact that the virus is so pitiful makes it even worse; because it suggests that high-density fuckupitude, rather than sophisticated malice, is all it takes to get a serious defect onto loads of production systems.
Just another reason to always build and verify your own system images, I guess.
"Eee PC" =/= "Eee Box"
The Eee PC is Asus' line of netbooks. The Eee Box is Asus' line of nettops. While in some ways they are similar, in other important ways they are very different products.
I bet it doesn't come on the Linux version.
When will we get equal treatment from hardware vendors?
Strange. I am using Ubuntu right now using WPA2 and it seems to be working. Or, I could just be imagining this.
Which is entirely possible, because I can't understand why someone would be afraid to post a slashdot post without clicking the Anonymous button.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
The Eee ships without a wireless stack that can do WPA, or at least did. I worked on one for someone, and that was their issue. This may have changed by now, but it sure was a stupid move at the time.
That may have been true of the Eee 700 series, but I have an Eee 900 and it had no trouble connecting to my WPA-PSK access point with the default software. It would've been easier with NetworkManager instead of their custom configuration interface, but it worked nonetheless.
What I really don't understand is why, for a project which started out Linux-only, it contains so much hardware with mediocre-to-poor Linux support: the wireless card and the Ethernet adapter both require out-of-kernel drivers; the ACPI interface can't seem to get the battery capacity right; the sound support is flaky at best due to incomplete specs; and yet another driver was required for basic ACPI support (now part of the kernel). I managed to get it all working under a stock distro (Debian) eventually, and I'm quite happy with it -- I like a challenge now and then -- but if you're going to build a Linux laptop, why not pick hardware known to be compatible?
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
The 701 EEE could use WPA-PSK, the wireless encryption common to most consumer grade routers.
What it can't do is WPA-EAP that is commonly found in corporate environments and universities. This is probably what the parent was trying to say. You can see it's SSID, but when trying to connect it only gives a box for you to type the password but nowhere for the username.
The workaround for it was to install the wpa_supplicant package from Debian and hope that it worked.
Unicode in Slashdot
Why is it that many people suddenly don't seem to learn punctuation and capitalization in school anymore? Your post might be very interesting or insightful but sorry, my eyes hurt just looking at it.
-- Cheers!
I don't know if it's because I'm running on no sleep, or that images of patch panels are swimming in front of my eyes due to a late-night rack-a-thon, but that was one fine rant.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
When MSI ran into serious trouble with Linux returns,
The problem is, MSI doesn't say 4x what.
Thus, it's a meaningless statistic, and every time you read an article that mentions "Linux returns 4x greater than Windows" you wasted time learning nothing.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Because the use of Linux was accidental, not the objective. The target was to make it inexpensive.
Even if you disable autoplay with group policy, the autorun.inf file will be read during startup, if you leave a CD in the drive or the autorun.inf file is on a hard drive...
You have to hack the registry...
You do not want to run anything new landing on a system by default or even prompt to have it run.
It's a remarkably stupid design.
So should a DVD player or home theater PC not start the DVD or prompt the user to start the DVD? Should a video game console or gaming PC not start the game or prompt the user to start the game? Please clarify.
hack the registry? that sounds hard i think im just going to install gentoo instead.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!