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Got a USB WiFi adapter that first mounted as a fake CD ROM drive with some software that I had to install before it'd actually function as a WiFi adapter. That's a new one on me. How does that even work

@lion
that's scary but also pretty neat honestly. more devices should include the drivers on the device itself tbh

@lion Oh yeah, I had some AVM Fritz USB Wifi stick model 10-15 years ago that did that too, showed up as some sort of mass storage (probably CD-ROM as on yours) with an installer on it. No idea how that works tho, maybe some kinda microcontroller inside that only provides mass storage until the driver says, no, you're a network device now?

@lion yeah, windows stopped autorunning USB-drive files at some point, so devices started appearing as a multifunction device, where one device is a CD-ROM, then they insert a virtual CD into it, so windows will autorun it.

I think windows now fixed that and it won't autorun them either, but I think it worked back on Windows 8

@foone @lion I've got a 1TB USB SSD that mounts as a 1TB disk + a virtual CD-ROM with drivers that you don't need, but you can't get rid of. Blah.

@lion had a promotional memory stick once that appeared to windows both as a standard USB drive and a CD-ROM drive (with unremovable files) at the same time. USB can just kinda pretend it's anything if it wants to.

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