Just remove soldered wifi and wwan whitelists from current thinkpads. The rest is already good enough. Intel trying stupid shit makes sense, but lenovo has started soldering wifi on AMD laptops too.
Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025
151–160 of 185 posts
Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not chx, but note that none of the linked articles mention Thinkpads.
All of these links do though and they include examples of more hard coded passwords, more Lenovo spyware, and more insecure Lenovo software that exposed users to threats: https://www.theregister.com/2018/01/26/lenovo_thinkpad_finge... https://www.computerworld.com/article/2984889/lenovo-collect... https://www.crn.com.au/news/thinkpad-vulnerable-in-latest-le... https://www.pcworld.com/article/633410/up-to-100-lenovo-l…
Well that would do it then.
Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025
#153It would be great if this includes removing the vendor-lock that Thinkstations apply to AMD workstation CPUs when they're installed. This creates an amount of ewaste as these CPUs are otherwise fully functional.
Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025
#154Given all the well documented "don't trust Lenovo" comments here, anyone have anything specifically negative to say about any other brands in particular? Genuinely curious. For example, Asus, Acer, Toshiba etc?
Toshiba no longer makes computers. Thanks to their 2015 accounting scandal, they had to sell their computer division to Sharp, who now sells some very unremarkable machines under the name "Dynabook".
Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. Could you point us to more technical information about this "feature" of Windows? I'm hoping someone has reverse-engineered it somewhere, but I'm not finding anything with some brief Googling.
No need to reverse engineer it when it's fully documented: https://download.microsoft.com/download/8/a/2/8a2fb72d-9b96-...
Thank you!
Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025
#156"(Lenovo) said people buy new smartphones every other year but became accustomed used to buying new PCs every six or seven years. The industry needs to do better at motivating people to buy new devices" https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/microsofts-panos-panay-expla...
I bought a used T530 6 or 7 years ago. The machine is 10 years old and it's still my daily driver. My desktop is of a similar vintage, probably 2011 or so.
It's perfectly fine. I do wish I had more CPU cores, but it's probably better for me to get up and step away from the computer while it runs a big C++ compilation or something
Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025
#157I would pay a shameful amount of money for a big, fat laptop in the style of the old school thinkpads with modern hardware.
I don't give a fuck how thin or light my laptop is. I want it big and beefy with some monstrous heatsinks and fans that don't sound like a jet engine after 3 seconds of CPU load. I want all the ports and a battery that weighs five pounds.
Current design trends for laptops has resulted in significantly worse machines. It's why I still use a T530 from 2013 as my daily driver. I'll probably keep using it until it finally develops a fault that I can't repair. Barring a catastrophic accident like a spill or a drop, I expect it to keep on chugging for at least another 5-10 years.
Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, and that's due to 2 reasons. 1. The malware was a rootkit for Windows 2. Windows has an interesting "feature" that will blindly auto-install software that is embedded in a certain location in the BIOS. If a rootkit is placed there, Windows will always try and install it. It's bad for Lenovo, but it's also bad that Windows has this anti-feature.
Re: #2 - The UEFI bloatware/rootkit checked the Windows version: if you used Windows 8 or up it used the "feature" called "Windows Platform Binary Table", but Windows 7 didn't have that, so for Windows 7 it overwrote CHKDSK.EXE with a Lenovo loader on every reboot. So, yeah, they were overwriting OS binaries on disk, not just relying on WPBT. (But no reports of binaries being overwritten on on Linux)
I'm surprised they got around windows file protection! That had been around since at least XP so I wonder what they did to avoid it.
The writers of the malicious software lenovo has so far been caught including in their products were specifically targeting windows users, but I see no reason to think that they wouldn't include malicious software that targets linux if some seedy company decided it was worth the effort to write it and offered lenovo enough cash. Their total lack of integrity and respect for their customers is enough that I could never feel fully confident that I was safe just because I was running a non-windows OS.
Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
No need to reverse engineer it when it's fully documented: https://download.microsoft.com/download/8/a/2/8a2fb72d-9b96-...
Thank you!
On the subject of this "feature", I found this handy
https://michlstechblog.info/blog/windows-identify-a-wpbt-bin...
Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re: #2 - The UEFI bloatware/rootkit checked the Windows version: if you used Windows 8 or up it used the "feature" called "Windows Platform Binary Table", but Windows 7 didn't have that, so for Windows 7 it overwrote CHKDSK.EXE with a Lenovo loader on every reboot. So, yeah, they were overwriting OS binaries on disk, not just relying on WPBT. (But no reports of binaries being overwritten on on Linux)
I'm surprised they got around windows file protection! That had been around since at least XP so I wonder what they did to avoid it. The writers of the malicious software lenovo has so far been caught including in their products were specifically targeting windows users, but I see no reason to think that they wouldn't include malicious software that targets linux if some seedy company decided it was worth the effort…
Windows File Protection seems ineffective against malware signed by a Microsoft vendor.
and/or for malware that can disable WFP.