I had to read twice and go through the article to make sure of the amount. IMO they'd deserve _way_ more than that. The precedent is scary.
Lenovo makes $45b a year, so the fine is maybe an hour and a half of revenue.
Lenovo to pay $7.3M for installing adware in laptops
11–20 of 131 posts
Re: Lenovo to pay $7.3M for installing adware in laptops
#12I'm always surprised that Lenovo use in the enterprise space didn't take a hit after all this came to light. I would have thought competitors like Dell and HPE would have used that opportunity to disparage Lenovo.
Re: Lenovo to pay $7.3M for installing adware in laptops
#13So, somewhat offtopic. I'd like to buy some tablets as presents and the Lenovo ones seemed well rated for the price. Are there others that are made by a, umm, nicer company? I'm looking for cheap and reliable rather than performant.
Re: Lenovo to pay $7.3M for installing adware in laptops
#14So, somewhat offtopic. I'd like to buy some tablets as presents and the Lenovo ones seemed well rated for the price. Are there others that are made by a, umm, nicer company? I'm looking for cheap and reliable rather than performant.
So what's your price range? Ipads were down to 249 which I'd consider pretty darn cheap.
Re: Lenovo to pay $7.3M for installing adware in laptops
#15Fines are just a cost of business to corporations. We need to put people and prison and take control of the corporation, turning it over to the public.
[flagged]
Maybe nationalization should be an option when a company, say PG&E for example, has poorly maintained equipment that starts forest fires. It seems reasonable that an option like that should be on that table as a deterrent reserved for the worst actors.
I don't think that anything like that should have happened here, but the fine of ~$10 a laptop does seem a bit low for MitM.
Re: Lenovo to pay $7.3M for installing adware in laptops
#16I'm always surprised that Lenovo use in the enterprise space didn't take a hit after all this came to light. I would have thought competitors like Dell and HPE would have used that opportunity to disparage Lenovo.
No enterprise is using the base windows image that came from Lenovo with the superfish malware. They all build their own standard operating environment image that would not include the Lenovo bloatware. I would be surprised if Lenovo enterprises even realized they were shipping this way and have no reason to react negatively. Their competitors also live in glass houses and so cannot throw stones.
Re: Lenovo to pay $7.3M for installing adware in laptops
#17Seems like a small fine, compared to the potential financial benefit of that installation. Hopefully it serves as a deterrent for future adware installs. If not, maybe we start calling our lawmakers. For those of you in the adware space, would you pay >$10 per head to install your adware onto a computer? My guess is absolutely.
Amazon gives you a $20 discount to take ads on Kindle purchases. The possibility of having to pay $10 only if caught and fined seems like not at all a deterrent.
Agreed it’s tiny.. hopefully this fine implies that future infractions may carry much more serious penalties
Re: Lenovo to pay $7.3M for installing adware in laptops
#18I'm always surprised that Lenovo use in the enterprise space didn't take a hit after all this came to light. I would have thought competitors like Dell and HPE would have used that opportunity to disparage Lenovo.
No enterprise is using the base windows image that came from Lenovo with the superfish malware. They all build their own standard operating environment image that would not include the Lenovo bloatware. I would be surprised if Lenovo enterprises even realized they were shipping this way and have no reason to react negatively. Their competitors also live in glass houses and so cannot throw stones.
So yes, in a normal case, one would expect to be safe because they are using their own built image. But Lenovo went much further than simply installing crapware, they added a firmware that updates files on startup in the OS to ensure that they had a way to install whatever they wanted onto your system [1].
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nas...
Re: Lenovo to pay $7.3M for installing adware in laptops
#19I'm always surprised that Lenovo use in the enterprise space didn't take a hit after all this came to light. I would have thought competitors like Dell and HPE would have used that opportunity to disparage Lenovo.
No enterprise is using the base windows image that came from Lenovo with the superfish malware. They all build their own standard operating environment image that would not include the Lenovo bloatware. I would be surprised if Lenovo enterprises even realized they were shipping this way and have no reason to react negatively. Their competitors also live in glass houses and so cannot throw stones.
Lenovo is known to install rootkits in their devices [1], which an OS image will not prevent.
Do you have a citation for Lenovo's competitors installing comparably vulnerable malware?
[1] https://threatpost.com/lenovo-hit-with-criticism-over-second...
Re: Lenovo to pay $7.3M for installing adware in laptops
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
No enterprise is using the base windows image that came from Lenovo with the superfish malware. They all build their own standard operating environment image that would not include the Lenovo bloatware. I would be surprised if Lenovo enterprises even realized they were shipping this way and have no reason to react negatively. Their competitors also live in glass houses and so cannot throw stones.
So yes, in a normal case, one would expect to be safe because they are using their own built image. But Lenovo went much further than simply installing crapware, they added a firmware that updates files on startup in the OS to ensure that they had a way to install whatever they wanted onto your system [1]. [1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nas...
To add to this, while the Superfish issue only affected their consumer laptop lines (e.g. IdeaPad), the LSE issue was found on their enterprise lineup (e.g. ThinkPad).