101–110 of 321 posts
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I've never encountered any ads in printed books. Edit because I can't be bothered to reply to all the comments below: excerpts from other books (often by the same author, or in a similar genre) are not ads IMO. They're not intrusive. They're pretty much always relevant. They're fun to read. They don't contain tracking cookies. They're as benign as it gets.
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> PC laptops are now budget machines so they compete on price. My Surface Pro was a hair below $2000. I was also considering a Lenovo X1 Yoga that was well above $2000. You sure that's competition on price?
I guess one could claim "companies that compete on price in some large section of the market form internal dysfunctions that cannot be reliably walled off from the parts of the companies that produce high-end products". Indeed, there's always a suspicion, perhaps reasonable, when mass-market companies produce luxury products, e.g., McDonald's McCafe or Ford sports cars. Some such companies often try to avoid this, wi…
On the other hand, that's a bit counter my experience. Working in a large company, I feel like walls keep emerging spontaneously and piercing through them is the bit that requires work. Often people inside the company cannot tell apart two teams working on related things, but the teams just won't talk to each other. Much less allow any kind of convergence to happen.
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People seem to feel okay with it given they use Linux and thus everything is nominally open source.
The problem is that Superfish is BIOS malware. If Lenovo is willing to infect its BIOS for profit, I'm not sure that running Linux is safe on their hardware.
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The problem is that Superfish is BIOS malware. If Lenovo is willing to infect its BIOS for profit, I'm not sure that running Linux is safe on their hardware.
Having proof from that incident that hw isn't necessarily safe, + the risk of a repeat offence affecting Linux, is probably a net positive for Linux security.
Does anyone actually buy Lenovos after what happened with SuperFish? [0] [0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/superfish-to...
Vendors have enough control about locked-down devices that they could play ransomware and make arbitrary demands to their users without many problems. And "device" can be anything from phones to cars to smart homes or expensive specialized equipment.
I'm not sure how the legal situation is currently, but since the Stallman strategy of keeping devices free has evidently failed, I think it's high time for a comprehensive set of "digital consumer rights" that limit what vendors can do on "their" devices.
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>I remember most laptops nowadays can re-flash the BIOS from an attached USB with specific format and layout Source for this? I've seen it available on various enthusiast desktop motherboards, but I haven't seen it on laptops. I haven't even seen it on the pricier thinkpad line.
Instructions for one specific Dell laptop: https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetai... Expand the "Installation Instructions" part, and you'll see "Updating the BIOS from BIOS Boot Menu (independent of operating system)" I don't know if Dell supports it across all their laptops, but it has on the ones I've owned.
Does anyone actually buy Lenovos after what happened with SuperFish? [0] [0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/superfish-to...
ThinkPads are still the name of the game for enterprise laptop deployments. AFAIK, they don't contain any preloaded stuff beyond the OEM app (Lenovo Vantage). Some enterprises prefer the more stripped down Lenovo System Update instead, although I think users may need Vantage to change some hotkey, etc. settings. Still, for a business with stricter security standards, it would be ideal to do a clean reimage of all new…
I suppose startups (where but everybody is on a Mac) are not enterprises, then?
> Still, for a business with stricter security standards, it would be ideal to do a clean reimage of all new laptops regardless of vendor, and specifically add only the necessary drivers, etc.
There were some Lenovos that had vendor crapware in the EFI partition that would get auto-reinstalled by Windows when you’d do a fresh install.
I wonder if the ad bombardment we are suffering for some years now will eventually reach a critical point to trigger mass exodus or protests. TV got annoying with ads and viewership greatly decreased but that was caused by the emergence of the internet I think, what new technology options we have to escape the current ads to? The only other hope is that the massive amount of money in ads and data collection is actual…
> trigger mass exodus Or YouTube. Without blockers or YouTube Premium, it's getting to be like watching old shows in syndication on one of these TV stations you can never remember the channel number for. Five minutes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, five minutes of ads for things not available in stores, back to the show etc etc.