I found this article surprisingly clear. I expected to find an unreadable morass of legalese. Is the ill reputation towards legalese unjustified, or is the clarity of this article uncommon?
Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish
211–220 of 239 posts
Re: Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also the hot coffee lawsuit wasn't as stupid as people make out. The McDonald's coffee really was hot and gave Stella Liebeck some nasty burns.
Even if the coffee had kill her is still stupid; lets put it this way: making the coffee inhumanly hot is just as smart as cleaning the cups with cyanide, but we don't have a law that forbids cup cleaning with cyanide (or a silly message in every cup about it)
Nor do we have a law against hot coffee. But if you do something negligent or with foreseeable harm then you may be liable, as McDonald's was, in a tort.
Re: Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 18 months no one will remember this. Honestly, corporations face basically no repercussions from customers because of doing stupid or outright malicious things.
Sony's been on my "do not buy" list since the rootkit debacle. They're missing out on sales of video games, cameras, and other consumer electronics (not to mention music and movies) for their misbehavior. And I know I'm not the only one who remembers.
That's good for you, and I fully support your decision, but I wish to posit an argument about Sony and their numerous "debacles" over the past decade starting from the CD Rootkit.
Do you remember when Sony went after GeoHot, George Hotz, and fail0verflow for his and their reverse engineering of the PS3 and the outrage and virtual pitchforks that were raised with others touting that they too would never purchase a SCEA/SCEI product again?
Remember even more outrage that was raised after PSN went down and it was revealed just how incompetent their internal network security was and how they allegedly stored unencrypted user information and used significantly insecure and broken cryptographic hashing algorithms?
In both instances, people said that they were done with Sony. Yet, the Xbox One has had significantly less adoption than the Sony PS4. Please note, I'm not going to argue that the people that said that they were no longer purchasing Sony products are the very same people that bought a PS4 over an Xbox One, but I am arguing that these people had a minuscule to nonexistent effect on the overall repercussions against Sony as to not matter.
Searching for "Xbox One PS4 Sales" brings up hundreds of articles ranging from just after launch up to this very day with month-by-month numbers landing from a 1.4 million unit difference in January of 2014, to a 1.7 million difference between the PS4 and Xbox One in the second quarter of 2014, and estimates at that time of 9 million PS4s sold globally versus 5 million for the Xbox One. An article from October of 2014 pegs the PS4 at a 40% lead over the Xbox One. This is a significant difference. Apparently, no one else cares how draconian or insecure a company treats their data, because only a few people remember the short term disasters over the long term entertainment value they receive from the products produced by these companies.
Re: Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. The 'just because HN is mad' makes it sound like all the people here are boycotting Lenovo for irrational reasons. I don't think HN is 'mad' at the company, they just have some legitimate concerns.
Ah, I think it's possible HN to be rationally mad, but I still wouldn't weight that factor. I thought all pekk was saying is "I evaulate my needs, not HN's needs".
You are correct, but apparently this opinion is not okay to express on HN while it is always okay to say "I will never buy from Lenovo," even though the statements are mirror images of each other. There is a "right" opinion and a "wrong" one here.
Re: Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish
#215I purchased a Lenovo laptop in December, and it was one of the ones with SuperFish. They refused to give me a refund, because it was outside of their 30 day refund policy. It would be impossible to get a refund for SuperFish because the info came out in February and they were only infecting systems between September and December. However, there is a happy ending to this story. I went through my credit card company to…
You filed a chargeback against Lenovo and kept the laptop, or returned it? Was the laptop purchased from a dealer or direct?
It was purchased directly from Lenovo with a Mastercard. I purchased the laptop in early December, though they did not deliver until after Christmas (first strike against Lenovo on this laptop.)
The chargeback just went through successfully on Friday. I have not heard anything from Lenovo yet regarding returning the laptop. I can keep you updated on this if you like.
The woman at MasterCard was very helpful and knowledgeable. She was surprised about SuperFish, but seemed to understand it. I use the laptop professionally and do systems work, so I explained how I basically could not use the laptop for work and had to spend time double-checking some of the work I had already done for clients.
There are also annoying hardware issues with this laptop, various intermittent problems causing crashes. I didn't get into that though, and just stuck with the Lenovo omitting fraud / laptop unusable for work narrative.
I always heard good things about Lenovo, but the late delivery, SuperFish, and hardware issues are enough to make me avoid the company like the plague.
Re: Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is several different economic losses to calculate here, each surpassing $5. There is the cost of removing the malware, and cleaning up any damages it caused. This is normally done by estimating how many hours a professional would spend on it, and the wages they would demand. Second, is the for-profit claim of "TRESPASS TO CHATTELS". If someone goes and steal a car to run a taxi service, one would look at the il…
Didn't Lenovo release an update that removed the program? The relevant question for the court is probably, how many hundreds of dollars did the average Lenovo customer spend on professional Superfish removal? And the answer is probably zero.
Uninstalling Superfish doesn't remove the dodgy root certificate that it installed (which is the dangerous bit). As per Lenovo's guide[0] that still has to be done manually.
[0] http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish_u...
Re: Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely not true. I control purchasing for my company, and have caused to be purchased a bunch of Lenovo's. No more, though.
What will you switch to? I lost faith in almost all other laptop manufacturers due to poor quality.
I've got a Dell e7440 which is a really nice compromise between portability and power. It's built out of something metal and has survived me taking it everywhere so far. 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and an i7 does the job.
Re: Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also the hot coffee lawsuit wasn't as stupid as people make out. The McDonald's coffee really was hot and gave Stella Liebeck some nasty burns.
Even if the coffee had kill her is still stupid; lets put it this way: making the coffee inhumanly hot is just as smart as cleaning the cups with cyanide, but we don't have a law that forbids cup cleaning with cyanide (or a silly message in every cup about it)
I don't understand your comment. We don't clean cups with cyanide. What point are you trying to make?
Re: Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also the hot coffee lawsuit wasn't as stupid as people make out. The McDonald's coffee really was hot and gave Stella Liebeck some nasty burns.
Even if the coffee had kill her is still stupid; lets put it this way: making the coffee inhumanly hot is just as smart as cleaning the cups with cyanide, but we don't have a law that forbids cup cleaning with cyanide (or a silly message in every cup about it)
Coffee and tea are usually made with boiling or close-to-boiling water. Water in an open container at sea level simply can't get much hotter than 'boiling'. The argument that the coffee was 'too hot' seems specious. Instead, the design of the cup is the more important issue - the company was serving hot coffee in a cup that was prone to failure.
Re: Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not necessarily. Many of the higher end and business models come without spyware of any kind, not just this particular piece of software. I like that you said spyware , whether intentionally or not. Most people call these programs "crapware," "junkware," "bloatware," or third-party pre-installed software. Though generally speaking this third-party junkware isn't expressly designed to be spyware . Nevertheless, with…
I've never heard "crapware" "junkware" or "bloatware", definitely not "third party pre installed software". Everybody, included non technically literate people call this spyware. This is where names like "spybot search and destroy" come from.
I, for one, have heard all of those used. I'm not so sure tech-illiterate people even know what spyware even means.