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Can you ever imagine Apple pulling a stunt like this? No, because it’s astonishingly user hostile: Lenovo should be hanging their head in shame, not making out
by pja 12y ago
Can you ever imagine Apple pulling a stunt like this? No, because it’s astonishingly user hostile: Lenovo should be hanging their head in shame, not making out like it’s no big deal.
- Alupis 12y ago> Can you ever imagine Apple pulling a stunt like this? No Why would you jump to that conclusion? Apple is just a company... and through the right view-port, even something like this can appear to be "consumer oriented" to management ("we're helping customers locate products and services easier"). Recently Canonical thought it was a great idea to bake-in Amazon ads into their search lens... so ads and product placement tagged with their affiliate link were baked into your OS. No company is immune to doing stupid things, even Apple.
- tunap 12y agoActually, reading the NSA hard drive firmware hack a couple days ago rekindled my suspicions about all the MacBook Pro failures a few years back. Apple claimed the hardware was at fault & nothing short of sending off for a pricey, clean-room extraction would get the data back. Much to my clients' relief I recovered all the data from three MBP drives for a lot less than what the 'geniuses' quoted. *It was the HD controller at fault, I managed to get them to mount and read at an extremely slow rate, but in time all was recovered.
- kalleboo 12y agoApple is definitely not immune to stupid things. They've done a lot of stupid things. Apple have also made tons of mistakes when it comes to security and privacy. But I still have a hard time seeing Apple ever intentionally adding a feature that proxies all a user's encrypted connections to inspect the content and insert ads. Tim Cook's recent speech at the Cybersecurity summit sounded pretty earnest to me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI6DvV2muDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI6DvV2muDE
- rossng 12y agoNo company is immune to making ridiculous statements - Apple told people not to hold the iPhone 4 the 'wrong way', for example[1]. I can believe that management at Lenovo simply can't understand how serious this incident is - they're unlikely to have the technical knowledge needed to understand how severe the security problem is. I'm sure there are hundreds of Lenovo engineers tearing their hair out in frustration right now. Not that this excuses the management - they should be listening to their engineers. [1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/apple-responds-over-iphone-4-reception-issues-youre-holding-th/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/apple-responds-over-iphon...
- eropple 12y agoApple telling users not to hold the phone the wrong way is different in kind and several leagues of degree from "we are enabling anyone, ever, to MitM your connection to any website." I believe you are raising this point in good faith, but it verges on disingenuous to compare them.
- rossng 12y agoQuite right - they're not on the same level. However, both are certainly 'user-hostile'. The thrust of my argument was that most large companies are bad at communicating about technical problems because of the way the message gets filtered through management, PR, lawyers etc. It's probably fair to say that Apple hasn't ever done anything this bad - but it's also disingenuous to hold them up as an unfailing bastion of niceness and competence.
- pixl97 12y agoDidn't Apple do just that with Antennagate?
- noddingham 12y agoThe big difference is you don't mind when Apple does things like this. If you have "Hey, Siri" enabled then your phone's microphone is on all the time listening to everything you say. But I don't see a lot of people crying foul over that.
- tormeh 12y agoThe difference being that only Apple (and the us gov) can listen in, not the entire world.
- IanDrake 12y agoHuh? How so?
- vvpan 12y agoIf remember correctly their devices were sending back GPS coordinates to a server too?
- TeMPOraL 12y agoWell, there is a difference between "hey, we have this cool service you'd like but we need to process your voice data; maybe or maybe not we're doing something else with it" and "we're forcing ads down your throat and hey, now everyone can MITM you and rob your bank account clean".
- maccard 12y ago"Hey siri" is only enabled when your phone is plugged in, and it processes that particular phrase on device, not across a network.
- mikeash 12y agoThe big difference is that "Hey, Siri" isn't a privacy threat at all, and that Apple doesn't generally allow people to snoop on all of my supposedly-secure traffic and then say "oh, there was no problem" when confronted with it. About the closest they've come to that was the "goto fail" bug from a year ago or so, and that gave every appearance of being a mistake, and Apple didn't try to claim that it wasn't a problem (although they were, as usual, pretty quiet about the exact nature of the problem).
- tw04 12y agoYou mean like with spotlight in Yosemite?
- eropple 12y agoI'm on record around here about being angry with Yosemite sending requests off-machine, and it's the first thing I turn off. Lenovo enables anyone, anywhere, to MitM your bank. Difference in kind. Massive, massive difference in kind.
- takluyver 12y agoI imagine that whoever made the decision in Lenovo didn't understand that's what they were doing. They heard "(technical jargon)... replaces some adverts on webpages... Profit!" and signed off on it. That's not an excuse for this, but it smells like incompetence rather than deliberate malice (at least on Lenovo's part - Superfish/Komodia may be another story).
- eropple 12y agoI soundly reject the notion that everyone in Lenovo's chain of auditing and implementation just heard "technical jargon". No company is magically and universally nontechnical. And anyone who allowed this to pass and remains employed there is culpable.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- JustSomeNobody 12y agoTell me about it! Apple is user hostile in much more subtle ways.
- exelius 12y agoMany companies exist in a reality distortion bubble where they think that by phrasing a feature in a certain way, it becomes less customer hostile. Case in point; Lenovo pitched this as a "way for our customers to find new products". This is not a problem most users have, which is why the starting point for customer-centric design should ALWAYS be user feedback. This can be collected any number of ways (focus groups, surveys, etc.) but if you ask leading questions, you're going to get the answers you wanted to hear. I don't doubt that the people who put this product together thought that it was an enhancement to the user experience. The problem is that they didn't do the research prior to even developing the project. So the end result is a product that solves only one problem: how can Lenovo get in on some sweet advertising dollars?
- cowardlydragon 12y agoApple does directly or indirectly hostile things to its users all the time. Such as interoperability deficiencies, deleting competing apps from the store, etc. Wake up.
- Someone1234 12y agoApple told people for almost ten years (both on their website and in their retails stores) that "Macs cannot get viruses." They act like that wasn't a big deal.
- happyscrappy 12y agoThe number one source of viruses on a Mac is anti-virus software, don't install it. No system is impervious, there are levels of risk. Apparently the highest possible risk is running a stock Lenovo.
- geoelectric 12y agoI don't run AV software on my Mac because the threat and possible consequences are sufficiently limited. But I've never heard about AV software itself being a vector. Where can I find out more?
- joshuapants 12y agoI imagine that comment referred to fake antivirus software from webpage ads or something that users are tricked into installing. Something like ClamAV would be fine.
- username223 12y agoPlus, they have no reason to do so, because unlike Lenovo, they make a healthy profit on their hardware. (I believe IBM was in the same position with its ThinkPads back in the day.) In contrast, the bargain PC laptop makers have little or no profit margin on the hardware itself, so they're always looking for other ways to eke out a bit more money. This is why I'm willing to pay a bit more for things I rely upon and care about. If you were a climber, would you try to save a buck by using an off-brand, bargain rope?
- Alupis 12y agoLenovo isn't a "bargin PC laptop maker"... the Thinkpad series are some of the most highly regarded laptops in the industry... And to that extent, just because you paid more for an aluminum case with exactly the same internal components doesn't somehow make it seriously better... Macbook Air's for example have notorious overheating issues that kill the laptop...
- username223 12y agoYou kind of missed my point. Lenovo only put the spyware on their bargain laptops, not ThinkPads. ThinkPads and MacBooks may have unintended hardware bugs, but since they already make a profit, they're less likely to have intended crapware.