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Lenovo's Response to Its Dangerous Adware Is Astonishingly Clueless

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Re: Lenovo's Response to Its Dangerous Adware Is Astonishingly Clueless

#111

Post by JadeNB »

joshuapants wrote: post #91
JadeNB wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1.) Which US computer company has ties to US government? Literally owned by the government? But Lenovo isn't owned by the Chinese government, either. > 2.) How is US government authoritarian? Have you actually lived in a country that has no elected representative? The existence of more dictatorial countries doesn't mean the US isn't authoritarian—it is a spectrum rather than a dichotomy.

You would have to really flex the definition of authoritarian to include the US, to the point of making the word uselessly broad.

The OED says:

> Favourable to or characterized by obedience to authority as opposed to personal liberty; strict, dictatorial.

It's certainly reasonable to argue about whether this actually applies; but I don't think that it represents a useless dilution of the word to think that it might. (Well, not 'dictatorial', but the rest of it.)

Re: Lenovo's Response to Its Dangerous Adware Is Astonishingly Clueless

#112

Post by stcredzero »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #74
eli wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key word is significant . They're not claiming they didn't preload this software for money, they're just saying it wasn't for very much money. Such a small amount of money that they have no problem ending the relationship now that it's causing them problems. My wild guess would be they got in the ballpark of $0.25 an install.

A different way to frame the comment might be something like: "we were willing to sell out your privacy and security for a mere pittance, 'cause we're cheap whores".

My co-worker Tom has this mental model he calls the "prostitute-physician scale." Basically, it's a scale for measuring how willing you are to simply take the client's money and do whatever, versus giving advice in the best interest.

Re: Lenovo's Response to Its Dangerous Adware Is Astonishingly Clueless

#113

Post by Sami_Lehtinen »

buro9 wrote: post #13

Microsoft is currently doing Lenovo's work for them: https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/568800260111388672 The latest version of Windows Defender is actively removing the Superfish software and the cert. The text of the definition is here: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=us7iXvkn

Doesn't seem to remove SuperfishIEAddon.dll file nor related registry keys.

Re: Lenovo's Response to Its Dangerous Adware Is Astonishingly Clueless

#114

Post by stcredzero »

gumby wrote: post #101
engendered wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think it is purely happenstance. There is absolutely and unequivocally either brigading Microsoft fans, or paid shills, hitting HN hard. There was a garbage post on the front page yesterday and I left a completely benign post that didn't go with the pro-Microsoft/anti-Google narrative -- saw -11 within less than 60 seconds.

> Don't think it is purely happenstance. I agree that it's not purely happenstance -- I think Microsoft the company is making a genuine bid to be relevant again. It's a desperate bid, and I don't think it's in their DNA to succeed, but it'd be great if it happens. Personally I avoid using MS whenever possible; I still have to use Word and Excel to communicate with others, and some conferences still require a PPT file…

Microsoft always has had pockets of technical excellence. It's also always had the problem of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. This seems to be somehow built right into the company's structure. (So not DNA, more like epigenetics.) Perhaps these are just the problems faced by any big company in a nutshell?

Re: Lenovo's Response to Its Dangerous Adware Is Astonishingly Clueless

#115

Post by stcredzero »

burkaman wrote: post #68
ExpiredLink wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CD for the clean install is included in the Home versions? Interesting.

It's not, but you don't need one. You can make your own disk or USB pretty easily: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-re...

This is one of the things that Microsoft gets right, that I wish Apple would do better.

Re: Lenovo's Response to Its Dangerous Adware Is Astonishingly Clueless

#116

Post by eli »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #74
eli wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key word is significant . They're not claiming they didn't preload this software for money, they're just saying it wasn't for very much money. Such a small amount of money that they have no problem ending the relationship now that it's causing them problems. My wild guess would be they got in the ballpark of $0.25 an install.

A different way to frame the comment might be something like: "we were willing to sell out your privacy and security for a mere pittance, 'cause we're cheap whores".

I assume they didn't intend to compromise security. I think it's more accurate to say that they stiffed their users with adware that nobody wants in exchange for a little bit of money, and that were so indifferent to security and privacy while doing it that either didn't notice or didn't care that it was a fundamentally bad idea.

Re: Lenovo's Response to Its Dangerous Adware Is Astonishingly Clueless

#117

Post by stcredzero »

nkozyra wrote: post #9
billhendricksjr wrote: post #2

Great... I'm the last person in the startup world still using a PC, and it happens to be a Lenovo.

The time period where Superfish was included was a relatively small chunk of 2014, so you may not be impacted. A good general guideline when buying an off-shelf Windows machine is to do a full wipe first. There may be some manufacturers who are immune to this, but assume everyone's included some bloatware. I find too many people who buy Windows machines start by attempting to manually remove this stuff, which is ofte…

assume everyone's included some bloatware

We programmers should use this as an analogy for dealing with everyday psychological issues.

Re: Lenovo's Response to Its Dangerous Adware Is Astonishingly Clueless

#118

Post by john-waterwood »

engendered wrote: post #81
nailer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shrug . I thought someone needed to do machine learning as a service, especially that can be accessed from Python, so I upvoted an article on Azure. I think presentation should be separate from data, so I upvoted a comment on posh. I'm a OS X / Linux person (my name's probably in your distro somewhere) and sometimes Microsoft does good stuff.

And, strangely, I didn't say otherwise . I'm typing this message on Windows. My main development IDE is Visual Studio. My primary RDBMS platform is SQL Server, deploy of course on Windows. Yeah, the strawman that Microsoft can do no right is pretty easy to knock down, but has absolutely nothing to do with the context of this. Again, a post on the second page (a ridiculous, extremely low quality post that had to be fl…

When startups choose tech these days based on what HN thinks is cool and hip at the day the decission is made, you can't blame tech companies noticing this and trying to turn the odds in their favour.

Re: Lenovo's Response to Its Dangerous Adware Is Astonishingly Clueless

#119

Post by TillE »

ghshephard wrote: post #86

How on earth can Lenovo/Superfish state: "But Superfish tells us it stands by Lenovo’s assessment. “Superfish is completely transparent in what our software does and at no time were consumers vulnerable—we stand by this today.” a company spokeswoman said. “Lenovo will be releasing a statement later today with all of the specifics that clarify that there has been no wrong doing on our end.” Now that an official CERT a…

> back peddling

Just because I've been seeing this mistake a lot lately: peddling is selling. Pedaling is the thing you do with your feet.

Re: Lenovo's Response to Its Dangerous Adware Is Astonishingly Clueless

#120

Post by mod »

microtonal wrote: post #15
[deleted] wrote: post #4

[deleted]

Assuming that this isn't an intentional backdoor that they had to place, there is no defense, period. Intentionally weakening people's system, MITMing their traffic, and inserting ads in private communication. If an individual was doing this, let alone at this scale, they would be stamped 'hacker' and put in some dark prison for ten years. Now it's Lenovo, they will get away with an apology or a class action lawsuit…

Says the guy who's never been to jail.

Whoever decided to include this, I'm guessing, had ZERO idea what a MITM was. At best they knew it'd spam ads to hardware owners.

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