Lenovo Statement on Superfish • Hacker News Board

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#281

Post by Alupis » Thu, Feb 19, 2015, 8:52 PM UTC

unprepare wrote: post #230

tunap wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No, a windows user would have to buy a second copy of windows from microsoft" Or procure a legit, OEM install disk/image and reload using the key affixed to the bottom* of the laptop. *Pre-8 days, now you get to "hope" the gUEFI recognizes the media and auto-populates the embedded key for you. When(not 'if' in my experience) it doesn't, then "buy more" is the only option outside of Linux.

This is totally correct - I just meant that using Lenovos provided installation media would not resolve the issue. You can definitely use an OEM disk of your exact version with your printed serial. I too have had to procure new keys for win8 machines (did two last week that wouldn't recognize the keys on my machine)

Windows Vista and up did away with special OEM ISO/Disks. You can use your OEM license with any official ISO/Disk.

What you may of had issue with was your OEM license being activated too many times -- if that happens, the automatic online activation will not work. You must use the phone number to activate your license, and it will ask "how many computers is this license installed on"... of course you just give the answer "one" and it activates it with no problem.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#282

Post by x0x0 » Thu, Feb 19, 2015, 8:53 PM UTC

qzw wrote: post #275

x0x0 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't let this statement pass. You don't support lawsuits (all those pricks abusing the courts, extorting money from companies!)... right up until the hot second a company screws you , and then the courts are an appropriate recourse. Maybe you could consider becoming a decent human being, learning some empathy, and realizing that perhaps other people have used the courts as recourse because they, too, were scr…

Ok, I think you're assigning me to a camp in your head that I do not belong to. I'm not the corporation-loving, lawyer-hating, "tort-reforming" droid you're looking for. If you believe in the rule of law, which I do, then lawsuits are inevitable. There have been great lawsuits in history that have ensured freedom, ended injustice, and punished evil. But there have also been lawsuits used to bully, intimidate, and coe…

All of the above are a vast minority of lawsuits, and I read ambivalence as functionally equivalent to anti-tort. Again, you were ambivalent until your ox got gored.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#283

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Feb 19, 2015, 8:57 PM UTC

blumkvist wrote: post #252

TeMPOraL wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if this is opt-in mail, it's all cool. Where I live I, along with all my neighbours, have something like half a kilogram of spam mail weekly, all of it (except maybe first flyer from a newly-opened pizza place) goes straight to thrash. Scale this up to 1-million city or 30-million country and think of all this wasted paper, paint, electricity, fuel and labour.

They are obviously generating revenue, if they keep sending mail.

Now are they? I sometimes wonder about leaflets (and some form of Internet marketing) that maybe it doesn't really work, but it's so hard to tell that they just keep throwing money at it because everyone else does.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#284

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Feb 19, 2015, 8:58 PM UTC

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #261

TeMPOraL wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grocery shops have another trick up their sleeve - they lower prices on some products, but raise prices of complementary goods. So you can have a genuine discount on bread, and at the same time heavily overpriced cheese. They're betting on you not caring enough to split your shopping between multiple venues. My mother recently told me how she's tired of keeping track of prices (or price/quality tradeoff) in 5+ differ…

The real problem is the wasted time. You may save $20 bucks a week shopping around, but if it costs you 45 minutes and you make $40/hour after taxes, you are spending 45 minutes to save 30 minutes.

Indeed. Well, my mother doesn't make anywhere near that amount so it's worth the savings for her - the shops are just counting that people earning more won't bother shopping around.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#285

Post by Alupis » Thu, Feb 19, 2015, 9:00 PM UTC

username223 wrote: post #271

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.

Plus, they have no reason to do so, because unlike Lenovo, they make a healthy profit on their hardware. (I believe IBM was in the same position with its ThinkPads back in the day.) In contrast, the bargain PC laptop makers have little or no profit margin on the hardware itself, so they're always looking for other ways to eke out a bit more money. This is why I'm willing to pay a bit more for things I rely upon and c…

Lenovo isn't a "bargin PC laptop maker"... the Thinkpad series are some of the most highly regarded laptops in the industry...

And to that extent, just because you paid more for an aluminum case with exactly the same internal components doesn't somehow make it seriously better... Macbook Air's for example have notorious overheating issues that kill the laptop...

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#286

Post by EpicEng » Thu, Feb 19, 2015, 9:11 PM UTC

blfr wrote: post #266

joshuapants wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes more sense to trust someone who hasn't already been caught abusing your trust.

You can make the opposite argument: since they screwed up, they will be more careful in the future. This kind of heuristic reasoning is pretty weak.

"Screwing up" implies negligence, but not malicious intent. I think it's likely a bit of both.

They did "screw up", i.e., the financial side of the business thought it was ok to hurt the user experience in order to make more money, and the engineering side was too incompetent to realize the security risk. Why would this level of demonstrated incompetence lead you to believe that they will be better in the future?

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#287

Post by joshuapants » Thu, Feb 19, 2015, 9:49 PM UTC

blfr wrote: post #266

joshuapants wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes more sense to trust someone who hasn't already been caught abusing your trust.

You can make the opposite argument: since they screwed up, they will be more careful in the future. This kind of heuristic reasoning is pretty weak.

The fact that they've gone from minor user-unfriendly features to major violations of trust doesn't speak well to their learning ability or consumer care, however.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#288

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Feb 19, 2015, 9:50 PM UTC

blumkvist wrote: post #254

TeMPOraL wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's advertising, and then there's advertising. Maybe a hundred years ago ads were about product discovery, they are not about that anymore. For most of the needs we have there are already products so you can just discover the product categories via well... interaction with other people. A new class of product gets often gets its spread organically, or at least via product-discovery-ads. So for example, you didn't…

And what about if I'm a camera enthusiast who just likes to shoot photos, but doesn't have time to read all the photography news sites. Is that Canon ad on HBR relevant to me? Are Canon cameras subpar?

Are Canon cameras subpar? Probably not. Is the one that is displayed on ad an inferior choice for you? Most likely yes.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#289

Post by mark-r » Thu, Feb 19, 2015, 10:17 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #42

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.

> We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns. I work at a large Telco/ISP and I understand how this kind of thing happens (though I'm not excusing it). First they come to the tech people and we explain exactly what's going on. Our managers translate it so they can understand it, and push it up with their name on it. Those Directors translate it so th…

Reminds me of "The Plan": http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/waterstraat/how_the_plan_be... and many other places around the net.

Re: Lenovo Statement on Superfish

#290

Post by throwaway41597 » Thu, Feb 19, 2015, 11:34 PM UTC

shpx wrote: post #276

omegaham wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outstanding. It's like a ridiculous Law & Order episode where the defendant goes "I wasn't even in town that night." "So what's your face doing on all of these security cameras at the scene of the crime?" "... uh..."

so just to be clear, because I find this hard to believe, they are straight up, 100% lying? Or is this taking some hash generating code out of context or something?

It's hard to judge without digging into this spaghetti mess of files. But having the word retarget in your code seems like straight up lying to me.

Tracking is more ambiguous a word and I couldn't find where they define the userid. But however it is generated, it reads like it's unique. And in order to retarget users, you'd have to track which products they've viewed in the first place, that would imply storing browsing history (they deny storing user info as well) and uniquely identifying users across websites.

Given the coding style, I don't think the person(s) who wrote this code is/are doing anything clever other than what it seems.