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Somebody Tried To Convince a Raspberry Pi Exec To Install Malware On Its Devices (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Liz Upton, Director of Communications for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, has just published an email where someone was asking how much would it cost them for the Foundation to install malware on its devices in the form of a .EXE file. The email sender was asking for a PPI [price per install] quote.
Windows has a perfectly fine package manager. When you want to install a package you simply double click setup.exe and hit enter until the window disappears. Uninstalls are easy to, you just reinstall Windows and install every package except for the one you don't want.
Note that Liz Upton, the addressee, used the phrase malware herself. That's where the sensationalism started. Just blindly converting it into a Slashdot headline, that's the bad reporting part.
Whatever happened to common sense...?
Though this may be me projecting my own prejudices with bundled software, nearly a decade of working in tech support has loosened my definition of malware to include basically any software put on the user's computer without the user's informed consent. Many bundled packages and suites behave in the exact same manner as actual malware and are just as difficult to remove, if not more so in some situations as anti-malware/AV software will not see this software as "malicious" and will not remove it automatically. Given that one of the foci of RaspberryPi's is to provide a cheap computer option for whatever needs, it simply would provide a misleading option to users like the bundled junk that often comes on cheap Windows based laptops.
I am not purporting that this is what was meant by Ms. Upton, but it's not hard to see how she and basically most people could see the proposed software as "malware" to be bundled.
Is it? Newer Linux distros typically come with systemd, which many users consider to be malware because it's unwanted and can have a very negative impact. So it's not like Linux is any better in reality, I'm sad to say.
Holy shit, why can't people shut up about systemd? You people seem to bring it up at EVERY single opportunity, even if it's REMOTELY related.
Since you brought it up....
Complaints about systemd are like complaints about the TSA -- richly deserved, but kind of pointless, because that shit is just not going away (until it gets superceded by something even worse).