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Asus Ships Cracking Software On Recovery DVD
Posted by
timothy
on Wednesday September 17, @09:47AM
from the cold-sweat-in-taiwan dept.
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."
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Technology: How Asus Recovery Disks Ended Up Carrying Software Cracks 236 comments
Anthony_Cargile writes "We all now know about Asus shipping illegal software cracks and confidential documents/source code on their recovery DVD (and in the system root), but this article tells exactly how it happened. It's even more careless than you think, and most likely an accident."
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Someone Is Getting Fired (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone is getting fired, and Asus is going to be getting sued.
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Re:Someone Is Getting Fired (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Someone Is Getting Fired (Score:5, Interesting)
Good thing they included their résumé [imageshack.us] in there. : p
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Goes to show how PERVASIVE piracy is (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't keep it off your distribution CDs, you just have WAAAAAAY too much of it around.
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Re:Someone Is Getting Fired (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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Re:Someone Is Getting Fired (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Someone Is Getting Fired (Score:5, Funny)
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Because they're BSA members, of course. (Score:5, Informative)
I know you're joking, but for anyone who doesn't get the joke, Microsoft is a BSA member [wikipedia.org].
They only terrorize small businesses [ernietheattorney.net].
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Re:Someone Is Getting Fired (Score:5, Interesting)
> 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.
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Re:Someone Is Getting Fired (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Does that $150 lunch reside on your company's network?
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Re:Someone Is Getting Fired (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus licensing. Ever played with flexlm, or tried to figure out how many Microsoft CALs you need? No need with GNU - saves a ton of time and potential liability.
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Software Crackers? (Score:5, Funny)
Do they come with cheese?
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Cue lawsuit.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Cue lawsuit.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Did Microsoft get sued for its use of a cracked version of Sound Forge?
No?
Then why will ASUS be sued?
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All of this could have been avoided (Score:5, Funny)
If only they'd used 7zip instead! Oh, you fools!
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One of the files is someone's resume (Score:5, Funny)
To that person: If your goal was to get your resume noticed, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
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Well that's what you get (Score:5, Funny)
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Cracking tool? What about the docs? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would think that this would be of much more interest than some cracking tool one can download. Even the Asus source code should be of more interest as it could be used to improve FLOSS support.
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The Butterfly Effect (Score:5, Funny)
A guy burns a master CD while smoking a joint in Taiwan... Somewhere in Redmond, a large office chair is hurtled through a pane of glass.
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It happens, when QC isn't very high. Example: (Score:5, Insightful)
Several years ago I worked in a very large and respectable company that shall remain unnamed (but whose name rhymes with, say, "Nokia"...) and we just shipped our turnkey system with our software AND with the source code. And the company wasn't (and still isn't, AFAIK, but don't work for them since a long time) an open-source company :o) It was a screwup by the consultant guys in India.
I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often, knowing the level of QC that happens in India and China.
oh, right, [wnd.com] I forgot [nytimes.com] that it does [washingtonpost.com] indeed happen. [guardian.co.uk] Even nowadays (de javu). [time.com]
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Re:It happens, when QC isn't very high. Example: (Score:5, Funny)
"The quality checking will be happening as optional."
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This demonstrates the importance of formal English (Score:5, Funny)
Especially in international, multi-cultural enterprises.
When the executives said they wanted "Cracking software" on the CD, they meant it in the same way that Wallace does when he compliments Gromit on breakfast: "Cracking toast, Gromit!"
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Re:Cracking WinRAR is lame (Score:5, Informative)
I think the tool is actually for extracting the passwords for any protected archives created with the WinRAR application...
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Re:WinRAR (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re:WinRAR (Score:5, Informative)
Which, for the benefit of those who have never used 7-Zip [7-zip.org], 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. ;)
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