LG Split Screen Improves Usability and Reduces Security Drastically

Developer's Couch ^ | April 8, 2015 | Chris

[Utilizer]

Life is good (LG) is what you may say out loud when using LG stuff. Unfortunately, today I have to tell you that life is horrible. I recently upgraded to an ultra wide LG screen which comes with split screen software. While I am happy with the hardware, I am utterly disappointed how LG treats security. The TL;DR version is that instead of writing software properly, they just disable UAC upon installation in order to make their software work.

I received my monitor some time around last week and quickly installed the software. Nothing special has happened during the setup I thought. It asked me for a reboot and the other typical stuff you get during a setup. However, a week later I realized that my Notepad++ session is in Administrator mode without me even explicitly launching it as an Administrator. Normally, you have to right click on the icon and “launch it as Administrator.” Another indicator that something was wrong is that each time I used the “Run” application, it would start CMD with an Admin.

[Alas Babylon!]

Why not simply re-enable UAC?

We have a GPO here that turns on UAC so even if it did turn it off during an install, UAC would be back on after the machine restarted. Is the author claiming the split screen software won’t work with UAC? Why not try it? Can’t the software be “Run as Administrator”?

Sometimes you have to test things and adjust. As a system administrator, testing is my life!

[cartan]

Because I would not trust software that does something stupid like this. Who knows what else it has messed up?

[Utilizer]

Well, to be quite fair about it, it seems as if the software requires the user (or admin) disable the UAC to function properly, so it does not technically force anyone to do so.

You simply will not be able to continue unless you follow the program’s instructions. Therefore the conundrum, it appears.