Re:Huawei Hacked My Laptop
by rcarmo on Saturday July 25, 2020 @10:23AM
(#23949378)
I worked with Huawei back when the first dongles of this kind started coming to market (some time after 2004, in the 3G days). Their QA was virtually non-existent, and it took us something like twelve tries to get a hybrid (Mac/PC) image preloaded onto it.
The Windows drivers were unsigned, the “dashboard” application for managing the dongle was horrible (and the Mac version, which I was especially responsible for, was so bad I eventually asked to provide a modem script instead). But I could not attribute any of it to malice, really (as the saying goes...).
And yes, those things usually have a plethora of USB functionality inside them, from a USB UART (Ethernet in some variants) to storage, which usually had drivers and carrier-specific apps to configure the dongles.
Now, this post does pose some questions, but not necessarily about Huawei - last I checked, Linux had no autorun functionality, so I’m wondering if the author didn’t actually run some portion of their installer without thinking of the consequences?
The Windows drivers were unsigned, the “dashboard” application for managing the dongle was horrible (and the Mac version, which I was especially responsible for, was so bad I eventually asked to provide a modem script instead). But I could not attribute any of it to malice, really (as the saying goes...).
And yes, those things usually have a plethora of USB functionality inside them, from a USB UART (Ethernet in some variants) to storage, which usually had drivers and carrier-specific apps to configure the dongles.
(My notes on the E220 are still around - https://taoofmac.com/space/com/Huawei/E220 has a bunch of low-level stuff I had actually forgotten about)
Now, this post does pose some questions, but not necessarily about Huawei - last I checked, Linux had no autorun functionality, so I’m wondering if the author didn’t actually run some portion of their installer without thinking of the consequences?