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Lenovo Statement on Superfish

news.lenovo.com

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Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#161

Post by kalleboo »

Alupis wrote: post #45
pja wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you ever imagine Apple pulling a stunt like this? No, because it’s astonishingly user hostile: Lenovo should be hanging their head in shame, not making out like it’s no big deal.

> Can you ever imagine Apple pulling a stunt like this? No Why would you jump to that conclusion? Apple is just a company... and through the right view-port, even something like this can appear to be "consumer oriented" to management ("we're helping customers locate products and services easier"). Recently Canonical thought it was a great idea to bake-in Amazon ads into their search lens... so ads and product placeme…

Apple is definitely not immune to stupid things. They've done a lot of stupid things.

Apple have also made tons of mistakes when it comes to security and privacy.

But I still have a hard time seeing Apple ever intentionally adding a feature that proxies all a user's encrypted connections to inspect the content and insert ads.

Tim Cook's recent speech at the Cybersecurity summit sounded pretty earnest to me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI6DvV2muDE

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#162

Post by mikeash »

notsony wrote: post #118
chinathrow wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I have been buying IBM and then Lenovo Thinkpads for ages. I hate the thought that my next machine will be another brand. Lenovo: One customer lost. More to be lost.

Why stop buying Thinkpads? Lenovo have acknowledged the issue and are now trying to resolve it. Everybody makes mistakes but how they fix those problems tells you a lot about the culture of the company. Lenovo also made a terrible mistake in removing the physical click buttons, but is now reintroducing them across their entire laptop range for 2015. What I see is a company willing to listen and admit their mistakes.…

Their response is basically that this wasn't even a problem, but they'll still stop because people are making a big deal out of it for no reason and it's good to keep people happy, even when they're idiots.

This seems like a pretty good reason to drop them. When you catch somebody misbehaving, and their response is "fine, I'll stop, but it wasn't a problem" then you can't trust them at all.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#163

Post by omegaham »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #36
tyho wrote: post #27

> The relationship with Superfish is not financially significant; our goal was to enhance the experience for users. I would prefer for this to be a lie than for it to turn out for this statement to be true. Surely nobody at Lenovo honestly belived that ad injection improved user experience?

This would SEEM obvious because as techies we hate ads. But you can't extrapolate this to the general population. There was one time when I visited my mother. We started her instant messaging program, and we were presented with special offers. I recognized it as such within half a second, so I almost automatically checked the 'Do not show this again' checkbox. My mother alarmed me: "No, do not make it go away! I want…

The difference is that I go to the supermarket every week and spend money, so coupons save me money on stuff that I'd be buying anyway.

In contrast, Internet advertising offers me pretty much nothing of interest.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#164

Post by TeMPOraL »

doodpants wrote: post #136
therealwill wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, a lot of people use their computer to purchase things. How do people know what to purchase? Ads! Therefore more ads = more knowledge about what to purchase and results in a better user experience QED /s.

You know, I often feel as though I'm living in a cave, because there are many things out in the world that I'm unaware of, and I often wonder if it's because I use Adblock. Take Uber, for example. It's apparently a popular ride-sharing service, which I've only heard of recently due to a bunch of articles about them getting into trouble with the law. So how did that service get to be so popular to begin with? How did…

Well, truth be told, most products and services out there are crap, and if something is actually good (or stupidly bad), you'll learn about it anyway. People like to talk about things that solve their problems well. Hell, in tech the Hacker News itself is a nice place for that; most of my "product discovery" happens here. Sure, maybe sometimes you will be late to the party, but you'll find out about good products eventually, and hell no, I'm not going to look at ads unless forced at gunpoint.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#165

Post by Vir0 »

We have a Lenovo G710 at work that was purchased less then a month ago and the amount of bloatware installed on that thing is quite amazing really it's almost a type of art.

The Superfish cert is there, however the VisualDiscovery service that injects the adds was at some point disabled as I could only find remnants of it in form of INI files and registry keys.

A quick fun fact, There are two encrypted INI files located in the Windows Folder :

A.) VisualDiscovery.INI

B.) VisualDiscoveryOff.INI

If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the guy that developed this shit then I don't know what will.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#166

Post by TeMPOraL »

mikeash wrote: post #162
notsony wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why stop buying Thinkpads? Lenovo have acknowledged the issue and are now trying to resolve it. Everybody makes mistakes but how they fix those problems tells you a lot about the culture of the company. Lenovo also made a terrible mistake in removing the physical click buttons, but is now reintroducing them across their entire laptop range for 2015. What I see is a company willing to listen and admit their mistakes.…

Their response is basically that this wasn't even a problem, but they'll still stop because people are making a big deal out of it for no reason and it's good to keep people happy, even when they're idiots. This seems like a pretty good reason to drop them. When you catch somebody misbehaving, and their response is "fine, I'll stop, but it wasn't a problem" then you can't trust them at all.

> When you catch somebody misbehaving, and their response is "fine, I'll stop, but it wasn't a problem" then you can't trust them at all.

Indeed. This kind of response is one of the most disrespectful things you can do to another person. "Hey, what are so upset about? Chill, it wasn't a big deal anyway!"

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#167

Post by scholia »

0x0 wrote: post #70
tyho wrote: post #51

Microsoft seems to have a vice like grip over OEM's regarding preloading windows on every product they sell without exception, IMHO this is a terrible thing, but can't they do at least a little good and prevent OEM's from shipping anything other than a pristine image with no preloaded software? Surely the endless bundled crapware from every OEM just gives Windows a bad reputation in the long term. The popularity of c…

Exactly. If I were CEO of Microsoft now I'd terminate Lenovo's Windows OEM contract just for tarnishing the reputation of Windows. That would probably put Lenovo out of business, actually. Might get other OEMs to take notice too :)

Windows is openly licensed. You just roll up to the website and sign up, then you can do what you like.

Under the US Government-imposed anti-trust rules, Microsoft wasn't even allowed to charge the top OEMs different prices. Otherwise it could have discriminated against the "bad" ones.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#168

Post by quadrature »

eropple wrote: post #4

> We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns. I try to be measured around here, as hard as I can. I can't formulate a polite way to respond to this claim. Lenovo, you are full of shit, and maliciously so. There is no excuse, nor forgiveness, for what you've done here.

Is there a proof of concept that exploits this ?

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#169

Post by sejje »

tomp wrote: post #110
obsurveyor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keyword there is "snail mail." You're saying you really want this stuff in your mailbox every week? I don't want any snail mail(of any kind), any week but it's something I still have to live with.

In contrast, I've been refusing to opt-in to my banks online statements for a long time now, simply because I want to have important stuff (e.g. my money) printed black-on-white. Email can be easily faked.

Would it not be easy to print a fake?

I don't really understand why "can be easily faked" is how you're justifying this.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#170

Post by throwawaymsft »

notsony wrote: post #118
chinathrow wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I have been buying IBM and then Lenovo Thinkpads for ages. I hate the thought that my next machine will be another brand. Lenovo: One customer lost. More to be lost.

Why stop buying Thinkpads? Lenovo have acknowledged the issue and are now trying to resolve it. Everybody makes mistakes but how they fix those problems tells you a lot about the culture of the company. Lenovo also made a terrible mistake in removing the physical click buttons, but is now reintroducing them across their entire laptop range for 2015. What I see is a company willing to listen and admit their mistakes.…

A buffer overflow is a honest security mistake. This was a security sabotage.
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