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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

#121

Post by Kalium »

kachnuv_ocasek wrote: post #98
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.

That's like saying the majority of HNers are Gruber's drones for praising his business model, or Google/Mozilla/Node having a brigade of posters to praise their languages.

I, for one, rather enjoy being highly compensated to shill on HN for the highest bidder. It's great, easy money.

Has your check arrived this week?

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

#122

Post by nkurz »

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…

And, strangely, I didn't say otherwise.

The part that 'nailer' is correcting is your statement that "There is absolutely and unequivocally either brigading Microsoft fans, or paid shills, hitting HN hard.". You accused him (and me, and others who voted up this story) of being either a "brigading Microsoft fan" or a "paid shill". Your comments are being downvoted because individual users think that they are rude and false, not because of an organized pro-Microsoft movement.

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

#123

Post by john-waterwood »

remarkEon wrote: post #99
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.

Does everything have to be a conspiracy? So either Microsoft is building some good and interesting stuff, or there's some conspiracy to target HN that would get them...what, exactly? +Karma here?

Not just karma, too many lazy engineers choose their stack almost solely on a quick scan on HN to see what's cool.

You can date many startups by first looking at their stack, and then checking when that stack was cool here.

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

#124

Post by ForHackernews »

bigbugbag wrote: post #94
rdtsc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No 15 years ago Microsoft would have been the ones installing it. I think Microsoft went from being a hated software giant to sort of an underdog vis-a-vis Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. They are very big and strong no doubt, but I think the attitude they are projecting since switching CEO recently, their open source efforts, and such make them look pretty good PR-wise among the tech crowd.

In the past Microsoft would have been both installing it and have their security tool removing it, left hand does not know what the right hand do in large organization, then after figuring out they would whitelist their own spyware from the removal tool. This may have actually happened. The rest is simply PR, microsoft is still the evil corp it used to be but has to fight other evil corps to keep a share of a market…

> microsoft is still the evil corp it used to be but has to fight other evil corps to keep a share of a market it once dominated. Microsoft had too much money to burn to die quickly, its agony will take quite some time.

I don't buy it. I think Microsoft seems to have actually made real changes. If you want an example of what a giant evil tech corporation dying slowly looks like, take a look at Oracle. Their core business is basically obsolete, but they'll go on killing open-source projects and squeezing their locked-in enterprise customers for many years.

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

#125

Post by DanBC »

engendered wrote: post #54
jhou2 wrote: post #26

Kudos to MS, srsly. lol the amount of positive press that MS has been garnering recently on HN is impressive.

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.

You're getting downvoted for tone because of your repeated accusations of shilling.

In general any post that accuses other people of being a fanboy or a shill will attract rapid heavy downvotes, regardless of which company is criticised or which company is accused of shilling. This is probably a good thing.

There is plenty of anti-MS sentiment on HN that doesn't get downvoted.

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

#126

Post by TillE »

stcredzero wrote: post #115
burkaman wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple provides Recovery Disk Assistant, which is more or less the same thing.

Also, when the SSD in my Macbook Air failed, I was able to netboot their internet recovery thing, which let me install OS X on a USB3 hard drive. Pretty cool.

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

#127

Post by nissehulth »

albertzeyer wrote: post #24

Note that Lenovo has now removed the statement from their article: “We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns.”

Looks like they also removed a number of posts in the forum where the discussion started, including a post where a moderator wrote that customers asked Lenovo for this kind of service. The same moderator also pointed out that it was against the community rules to argue with moderators...

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

#128

Post by ForHackernews »

stcredzero wrote: post #112
CWuestefeld wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think many sex workers with personal standards would be insulted by your comparison with physicians, who seem to be happy to take money (not your money, I guess) to push drugs that may or may not actually help you[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQZ2UeOTO3I

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

#129

Post by chadgeidel »

rogerbinns wrote: post #79
pjc50 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is repeatedly recommended, but I think it's overlooking that not all manufacturer customization is entirely evil. You then to hunt down all the drivers for bits of the motherboard. Are you sure your power consumption settings etc are optimal after you've done this? Have you installed all the drivers "manually" via their inf files? (e.g. Nvidia drivers come with their own pile of bloatware)

Lenovo does this for you with their system updater. It downloads and updates all drivers for your system, including bios updates and configuration tweaks that affect power and stability. It will install on a fresh install from Microsoft media - ie there is no need to keep what was preinstalled on the system. http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/ht080136

I don't use those because i don't trust the manufacturer-provided "system updater" to only download drivers. What's to prevent them from surreptitiously installing their add-on garbage.

Even if it currently does not do that, I just don't trust it to not do that in general.

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

#130

Post by philh »

engendered wrote: post #54
jhou2 wrote: post #26

Kudos to MS, srsly. lol the amount of positive press that MS has been garnering recently on HN is impressive.

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.

> I left a completely benign post that didn't go with the pro-Microsoft/anti-Google narrative

This is simply not true, that comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076549) included "HN has seen a HUGE influx of Microsoft shills, and it's getting disconcerting." You're also being inconsistent with whether the post was on the front page or the second.

Given that, I'm not inclined to believe that you actually got -11 in less than 60 seconds.

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