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Mini PC maker "AceMagic" ships systems with factory-installed spyware (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This is probably a good reminder to not be tempted to buy random brand mini-PCs off Amazon and AliExpress.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Now that's a bit naughty. I would hope that the skill level of those who use mini-PC's for use-cases other than pure aesthetic would be able to nuke both partitions and start afresh anyway, sidestepping this type of shithousery.

The irony isn't lost on me that a site with more adverts than article words, quarter-page banner ads, and a convoluted GDPR consent tool has the gall to moan about spyware.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

Toms has never claimed to be perfect but they are one of the last places you can look to for some very detailed breakdowns that don’t involve scrubbing through a youtube video.

Back on topic, calling it spyware is a slap on the wrist. Metas tracking pixel is spyware. What was found was a keylogger, password stealer, and cryptowallet key stealer that was baked into the initial windows install and recovery partition.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I would hope that the skill level of those who use mini-PC's for use-cases other than pure aesthetic would be able to nuke both partitions and start afresh anyway, sidestepping this type of shithousery.

For sure, but what if it were a UEFI-embedded rootkit? Even Lenovo had those back in the day. And these days, with LogoFAIL vulnerable firmware still out in the wild, anyone in the supply chain could embed a malware in the UEFI (assuming that new boxes are still being shipped with vulnerable firmware, which, I won't be surprised if they were, as most of these small time vendors are pretty bad at pushing firmware updates).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

a site with more adverts than article words

Ublock origin, firefox on android allows you to install extensions.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

And Firefox Nightly allows you to install MORE extensions, such as Consent-o-Matic, which aren't available for "vanilla" phone Firefox yet!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

They're already available on "vanilla" Firefox for android.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I was reading this article from my company's iPhone (everything set to default basically) and look the ad they served me

An ad that talks about removing ads XD