Asus Ships Eee PCs With Malware 124
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.'"
Inaccurate Title (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Too bad they didn't stick with only Linux (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Too bad they didn't stick with only Linux (Score:5, Informative)
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 [gnome.org] 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?
Re:Too bad they didn't stick with only Linux (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:That's why you shut off auto-pwn (Score:2, Informative)
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...
Re:Tedium of manualrun to start a game (Score:1, Informative)
Explain to Joe Sixpack that he should go to My Computer and double click on the game's icon there.
Even on Windows systems where autorun is disabled, the autorun will activate if the user double clicks on the drive's icon. Actually exploring the disc requires using the right-click context menu.