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Lenovo are on my personal shitlist after superfish and abusing the windows platform binary table. When my current laptop dies (a thinkpad T440p that I'm reasona
by endgame 10y ago
Lenovo are on my personal shitlist after superfish and abusing the windows platform binary table. When my current laptop dies (a thinkpad T440p that I'm reasonably happy with), I may have to suck up the performance hit and go to minifree for a machine I can actually trust.
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- yuhong 10y agoAh, "consumer" vs "business" computers. I wonder whether this distinction even makes sense. I think the biggest reason it still exists at this point is Best Buy and similar retail outlets, right?
- user5994461 10y agoThe consumer space at Best Buy is focusing on whatever shit can be made and sold for < $500 dollars. And they are incredible at making stuff cheaper (whatever they may need to drop and break to reach that price). Business require better built laptops than that, they've got money to pay and they want to have decent services and support. As a special characteristics, they also never bother to have a GPU (save money and power but missing for some consumer folks).
- sz4kerto 10y agoThey seem to have signed up for the MS Signature program, so you might now get pure Win10 without bloat.
- kbart 10y agoI'm not sure Win10 is any better than Superfish..
- criddell 10y agoI have a signature ThinkPad bought at a Microsoft store and it came with plenty of software that I would consider bloat. Lenovo ships a lot of extra software on their systems. I'd still recommend a reformat and reinstall of Windows.
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- phunehehe0 10y agoSounds like a non-problem if you are going to wipe out Windows and install Linux anyway?
- yellowapple 10y agoAnd additionally a non-problem with the ThinkPad line, which is far less susceptible to this sort of tomfoolery.
- Capt-RogerOver 10y agoWhy would it be less susceptible? Isn't it the same company that makes them?
- yellowapple 10y agoYes, but the ThinkPads have a much bigger reputation on the line than the IdeaPads. Lenovo seems to know better than to annoy the businesses and power users that typically buy ThinkPads, whereas the IdeaPad-buying ordinary user is more tolerant of bloatware.
- Capt-RogerOver 10y agoNot if they have shown that they can go so far as to put in BIOS. Imagine the level of effort it requires to develop something like this? If that is true, why not develop a small dedicated chip for it and put it somewhere unaccessible on the motherboard? (I mean, it's likely that they did or will do this.) http://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html http://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html
- cryptarch 10y agoI'd recommend going with another vendor than Ministry of Freedom (by Leah Rowe). I ordered a laptop from there and it took months to get the payment processed and the laptop shipped, with barely any contact in between. I thought it was very unprofessional and it definitely was the worst online shopping experience I've had so far. Expect to wait at least three weeks for every time you send them an email. The laptop is OK, though it was dirty when it arrived. It had a bunch of some kind of sticker glue on it.
- endgame 10y agoAny vendors you'd recommend? (Non-x86 is fine.)
- yuhong 10y agoPersonally I think the FSF ideology taken too far is pretty ridiculous anyway.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10y agoAny reason? I'm not sure I disagree, but it would be helpful for you to provide some justification for calling them "ridiculous".
- yuhong 10y agomicrocode updates, for one
- cryptarch 10y agoThis is the only other option that has the FSF RYF certificate: https://shop.libiquity.com/product/taurinus-x200 https://shop.libiquity.com/product/taurinus-x200 One piece of hardware I'm very excited about is LowRISC: they're developing a fully open-source SoC, including open source chips, SoC and firmware. I think it's the most promising platform for formally verified computing, because it's open and thus possible to model and verify all the way down.
- Stratoscope 10y agoThinkPads never had Superfish nor the Lenovo Service Engine (the Windows Platform Binary Table thing you're referring to). Of course you're right that Lenovo never should have put those on any of their machines, but my impression is that ThinkPads and the consumer line are run by very different groups within Lenovo. https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lse_bios_notebook https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lse_bios_n...
- walterbell 10y agoUnfortunately, even a recent (Aug 2016) new Thinkpad T460p included a Lenovo Windows app that apparently runs daily to send "usage data" to Lenovo. It is easily disabled, but still troubling because most customers will be unaware that it exists. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2984889/windows-pcs/lenovo-collects-usage-data-on-thinkpad-thinkcentre-and-thinkstation-pcs.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2984889/windows-pcs/len... https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/ht102023 https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/ht102023 > As of September 2015: Lenovo systems may include software components that communicate with servers on the internet - All ThinkCentre, All ThinkStation, All ThinkPad
- Insanity 10y agoTo be fair, if it comes with a preinstalled version of windows you can never really be sure what is on the machine, can you? I suspect that if a company really wanted to hide something they probably could. So unless you install windows or another OS on it yourself, you don't know what the manufacturer put on it. I guess it would not be too hard to find in general if it shows up in the list of processes, but they could make it quite obscure and hard to find. But yeah, I agree that this is quite an annoying move from Lenovo. The least they could do is make it opt-in instead of on by default.
- StavrosK 10y ago> you can never really be sure what is on the machine, can you? Yes, but "not sure if it has spyware preinstalled" is much better than "sure it has spyware preinstalled".
- HarrietJones 10y agoOne thing to consider w.r.t. SuperFish is it was two years ago, and Lenovo did apologise for it. Sometimes you have to keep a grudge, but my opinion on this is it was something that pretty much any laptop manufacturer could have done and they did deal with it. YMMV.
- todd8 10y agoI have avoided buying anything significant made by Todhiba for 30 years. It's probably time for me to drop my grudge against them (it has to do with milling machines and corporate misconduct during the Cold War).
- ninjin 10y agoFor those of us that were somewhat puzzled about the mention of misconduct, I think this is what todd8 was referring to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba-Kongsberg_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba-Kongsberg_scandal
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