Ironic that your link to the ASUS site is (working) HTTPS.

I checked the liveupdate01.asus.com and dlcdnet.asus.com domains referenced in the article, and they can certainly serve over HTTPS...

Having a domain that can serve https is good and all, but it's no use if the client doesn't actually bother checking whether the cert is valid or not. The phenomenon is so prevalent that google needed to add a warning to developers in android's ssl socket documentation.

I wonder if someone has built a transparent proxy/router level implementation of HTTPS Everywhere... That might be quite useful.

That's like mailing a postcard to a company that puts it in an envelope for you.

Not really. I was thinking along the lines of a localized instance so it would be more akin to things being captured at the perimeter and getting converted there.

So outbound to an insecure HTTP url gets rewritten to pull from a HTTPS url instead etc.

Doesn't it affect only those who run Windows with this ASUS LiveUpdate thing installed?

But perhaps you meant that you must now, as a protest, shun ASUS products. I can sympathise with that.

Yup. The standard procedure that applies to pretty much any prebuilt computer. If you need to run the stock OS, reformat with the OS vendor's image ASAP, and make sure to only install the minimal driver packages from the hw vendor afterwards.

Thankfully it's trivial to uninstall. My UX390UA didn't have it installed(can't remember if I manually uninstalled it before) and took two seconds to uninstall from second one.

My reason for not buying one is because the screen res is small :(

I usually reformat them on arrival anyway.

Is the screen matte or glossy?