Hmm... I might be okay with this if it were set up in such a way where you had to explicitly select a specific option in the UEFI, such as "Reboot & Install Drivers", with further options to install drivers only, or install drivers and additional crap, like that ASUS Armoury Crate. I originally thought of shipping flash drives like they used to (in place of driver CDs), but if the tech is already there in a way where it can be done not only more conveniently, but also with less waste (there won't be many thousands of flash drives produced for this purpose... how many driver CDs exist in landfills now?), why not? However, I maintain that automatically installing garbage without the user's consent, or even knowledge, is bad. Aside from that point, how is it even convenient to install it automatically? Who on Earth is capable of reinstalling Windows, or worse yet, building a computer and installing Windows for the first time, yet is incapable of finding the install drivers option in UEFI?
That said, I could see this also being used as an attack vector. Imagine a new generation of malware that attacks this memory chip on the board. By installing itself to this memory chip, it would persist even through total reformat/reinstallation of the OS. Sounds a lot like that case our own
@R-T-B was working on not too long ago... only instead of a weird one-off case, it could become common if features like this become common. What's to stop that from happening? No antivirus is 100% perfect, and the users of the computers with these features damn sure aren't, either. I wonder what this free cat screensaver is in my email? That's another reason why having to explicitly select an option in the UEFI to install would be a good thing... unless the malware could force install itself, anyways. Malware doesn't always play by the rules.
As for privacy? While I value privacy as much as the next guy on TPU, I don't think privacy is really a concern here. Sure, the potential for throwing user data at ASUS through the ASUS Armoury Crate app exists (I've never used the software, so don't shoot me if there's no telemetry there), but I think the bigger concern here is the fact that many PC enthusiasts, like, the people most likely to buy ASUS motherboards, usually don't want tons of bloatware apps running with their computer... so now PC enthusiasts who like ASUS now have to deal with this self installing ASUS Armoury Crate. As for me, I don't even like the fact that I have MSI Afterburner running at startup, but I have to live with it because I can't edit and flash my own GPU BIOS anymore like I used to in the old days (I'd find out what clocks my card was happy at, edit those into the BIOS along with a modified fan curve/min speed, flash, then uninstall whatever OC tool I used), so I'd likely be blocking this app as well. Why have unnecessary crap running? If privacy was that big of a concern, better just turn off the Internet. Every hardware and software device, even on your own network, be it your modem, router, operating system (Windows 10 says hello) or even the network driver carries the possibility of having backdoors/throwing your data somewhere/etc... and that's not even starting with what's
outside your network. So yeah... I build my own computer for many reasons, but one of those reasons is because I don't want my computer coming with 50 free trials, which I didn't ask for, starting up with my computer. This move from ASUS doesn't fall in line with that too well.
but i got one , features tut. Got me now.
