3 ms·
This should be good news for people looking to getting rid of Computrace, effectively a rootkit, from surplus Thinkpads. http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.p
by gvb 10y ago
This should be good news for people looking to getting rid of Computrace, effectively a rootkit, from surplus Thinkpads.
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=114641 http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=114641
Yes, I bought a surplus Thinkpad (T61) and found it had Computrace activated on it. Grrrr.
Yes, I could call the Absolute(R) Software number and they should disable it for me. I have not been willing to sit on hold and jump their hoops to date. Since I run linux on the laptop, is fairly low risk for me, but Absolute(R) Software could inadvertently or intentionally "brick" my laptop. Grrrr.
- yuhong 10y agoI dislike the arms race against laptop theft. It is not as much talked about as encryption backdoors, but...
- throwaway7767 10y agoAFAIK all the ThinkPads have a BIOS option to disable CompuTrace. Mine has three options: "Enabled", "Disabled" (default option) and "Permanently disabled". The "permanently disabled" option erases the CompuTrace blob from the flash chip, so it cannot be re-enabled afterwards. This may not be the case for their non-business machines (i.e., not ThinkPad).