[German]I'm going to compile an information, that I've just come across, into a post – a second post on a similar topic will follow. Microsoft is offering a new Bing wallpaper app in the App Store that is supposed to show changing wallpapers. With the app, however, you get something on your system that shows veritable "adware behavior".
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Bing wallpaper just released
There is probably a store app under the name "Bing Wallpaper", developed and offered by Microsoft. The purpose of this app is to display a new wallpaper every day. It pretty much passed me by, I don't use it on my system anyway (therefore not mentioned in the blog) – but the colleagues from German site Dr. Windows mentioned it here.
Is Bing Wallpaper just "adware"?
Now I read in a follow-up article on German site Dr. Windows that the Bing Wallpaper app behaves like adware. The term is made up of the words "advertisemet" and "software", meaning software that shows the user advertising in addition to the actual function or installs additional software that displays advertising. Adware is usually free and functionally unrestricted, according to Wikipedia.
Kevin Kozuszek has picked up on the above tweet from Rafael Rivera. Rivera responds to a tweet from Michael Schechter that the "Bing Wallpaper" app is available in the Microsoft Store and is free of charge. Developer Rivera writes that the "Bing Wallpaper" app automatically installs Bing Visual Search. The app also contains code to search and decrypt Edge, Firefox and Chrome cookies.
On the latter point: I don't know whether Rivera is alluding to the information that Google Chrome cookie encryption can be overridden via an API. This information came to my attention in mid-October 2024. The colleagues at Bleeping Computer took up the issue at the end of October in the article New tool bypasses Google Chrome's new cookie encryption system.
You have to scroll through Rivera's entire thread on X to realize what shenanigans Microsoft's developers have integrated into their app. Of course, the Microsoft app also offers to change the Windows settings so that they use the app. Needless to say, the app also has a geo-location feature.
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Kevin Kozuszek has edited it at Dr. Windows and writes that they have removed the link to the store app from the first article and placed a bold warning about the app. So stay away from this stuff. But there is now a question: Isn't Windows 10/11 also adware?
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