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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

#141

Post by remarkEon »

john-waterwood wrote: post #123
remarkEon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it would actually be pretty interesting to do some kind of visualization over time with popularity of languages and mentions on forums like this.

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

#142

Post by stcredzero »

ForHackernews wrote: post #128
stcredzero wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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].

I do not object to this notion at all! For one thing, it's not my comparison, it's my co-worker's. Also, an "inversion" of the scale's sign would serve as a sharp and salient commentary on problems in our society.

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

#144

Post by stcredzero »

TillE wrote: post #126
stcredzero wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I see. They have that stuck into Disk Utility now. One point to Apple.

Disk Utility is a bit kludgy nowadays, though, and it seems they're not doing as good a job as MS publicizing the tool. (Too small a sample size here, but I ran across the MS tool by accident while searching/browsing. With Apple, a human had to tell me.)

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

#145

Post by ademarre »

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

That's good. It seems too few consumers get a clean Windows experience, and this fiasco has quickly become the chief example. You'd think MS would want to address that, perhaps by hardening their OEM licensing.

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

#146

Post by stcredzero »

nkurz wrote: post #122
engendered wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

You accused him (and me, and others who voted up this story) of being either a "brigading Microsoft fan" or a "paid shill".

Sorry, but that's just false as far as I can tell. He cited those things as the reason for his other comment's moderation. Please quote the text from which you draw your conclusions of attribution.

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

#147

Post by stcredzero »

jgrowl wrote: post #90
microtonal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, given that they are morally corrupt enough to do this to their customers, why not expect them to have similar trojans or backdoors on Thinkpads? If we assume firmware is safe, wipe it and do a clean install from trusted media.

Can we assume their firmware is safe though?

No. Firmware has been a part of the "trusting trust" conundrum for several years now.

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

#148

Post by tsax »

romanovcode wrote: post #134
john-waterwood wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only here but in general "coolness" is one of the main factors for choosing tech in startups. 2008 - So did you rewrite your PHP apps in Ruby? 2012 - So did you rewrite your Ruby apps in Node? 2015 - So did you rewrite your Node apps in Go?

I'd dispute the 2015 one. There have been lots of Go related articles on HN, but Go usually gets a mixed reception.

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

#149

Post by ghshephard »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #66

It tickles me that Superfish is a DFJ-funded [1] start-up based out of Palo Alto. Reporters are focussing on Lenovo's Chinese lineage. Yet this bubbled up out of our backyard, from our own lack of diligence (or scruples). [1] Edit: Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the $4 billion Menlo Park VC firm that backed Baidu, Hotmail, Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.

Looking over the executive team of Superfish (Which, creepily, refers people to their linkedin profiles - presumably so they can see who is looking at them.) I see that their Chief Product Officer (Cmpt. Science from Stanford, so obviously knew what was going on) is formerly from Zynga. Mark Pincus is (infamously?) known for his comments about how sometimes, when you are small, you have to do all these terrible things that you are really ashamed of, just so you can get big and never have to think about doing them again. In the case of Pincus, he was referring to a the zwinky toolbar that earns money by redirecting web searches to advertisements - oddly close to what just happened with Superfish/Lenovo.

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

#150

Post by [deleted] »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #66

It tickles me that Superfish is a DFJ-funded [1] start-up based out of Palo Alto. Reporters are focussing on Lenovo's Chinese lineage. Yet this bubbled up out of our backyard, from our own lack of diligence (or scruples). [1] Edit: Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the $4 billion Menlo Park VC firm that backed Baidu, Hotmail, Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.

[deleted]
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