9 ms·

Indeed. I have been buying IBM and then Lenovo Thinkpads for ages. I hate the thought that my next machine will be another brand. Lenovo: One customer lost. Mo

Indeed. I have been buying IBM and then Lenovo Thinkpads for ages. I hate the thought that my next machine will be another brand. Lenovo: One customer lost. More to be lost.

notsony 12y ago
Why stop buying Thinkpads? Lenovo have acknowledged the issue and are now trying to resolve it. Everybody makes mistakes but how they fix those problems tells you a lot about the culture of the company. Lenovo also made a terrible mistake in removing the physical click buttons, but is now reintroducing them across their entire laptop range for 2015. What I see is a company willing to listen and admit their mistakes. Can the same be said of other vendors, such as Apple?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- badsock 12y ago
  As part of "fixing their mistake" Lenovo just outright lied about the security implications. So what does that tell you about them?
- eridius 12y ago
  If I'm reading you correctly, you're making the argument that Lenovo, the company that was just discovered to have been intentionally shipping a massive security vulnerability on their laptops, is still thought of by you as listening to their users better than Apple, the company that would never in their wildest dreams even remotely consider the idea of putting something like Superfish on their computers, simply because Lenovo changed their minds and stopped shipping the security vulnerability? "Oh, no, my husband's a good man. He even promised to stop beating me!"
  - notsony 12y ago
    Clearly Lenovo are stupid for bundling third-party ad-injection software, but who knows what Apple are doing behind closed doors? e.g. CarrierIQ in the baseband... etc.
    - eridius 12y ago
      Just to be clear, this is Apple, the company famous for putting user experience ahead of everything else (and often criticized by developers for putting user experience ahead of developer experience). Apple, the company that routinely tops customer satisfaction surveys. Apple, the company that has gone on the record time and time again about how user-focused they are. There are plenty of valid things to criticize Apple for, but accusing them of sneaking malware onto their devices is not one of them.
      - avn2109 12y ago
        This Lenovo press release is evidence neither for nor against Apple's malfeasance. But I think we can all agree that if Apple does bundle malware, that malware's user experience will be thoughtful, smooth, and superbly curated. /s
    - Lawtonfogle 12y ago
      Who knows what <insert person or company of choice> is doing behind closed doors? What am I doing behind closed doors? What are you doing behind closed doors? While there is a chance someone may be doing something bad behind closed doors, that cannot be used as a reason for why they are worse than someone whose door we have opened and found doing something bad.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  They have acknowledged that the issue exists, but not what it actually is.
- talkingquickly 12y ago
  I'd argue that so far, that's exactly the point, their response makes it worse. "We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns" is a laughable statement to have issued. I can understand the legal reasons for not admitting to the security issues. But outright saying that they can't find anything to suggest they exist indicates a company I wouldn't want to do business with. To expand on that, in this case I know enough about the subject matter to understand that it's ridiculous to suggest there aren't security concerns. But I can't guarantee this will be the case for other problems. So going forward I'd probably avoid being a customer of a company who I have positive proof is prepared to issue blatantly incorrect statements about security issues.
  - markokrajnc 12y ago
    I also had to laugh when Jobs started talking about "antenna gate". Instead of saying "We made a mistake here" he started saying "other phones have similar problems", etc. So his response wasn't good, but people still buy Apple and Apply is currently the largest company by market cap...
    - HelloNurse 12y ago
      An antenna doesn't pose a security hole. Bullshit about antennas in other phones is Apple's traditional humbleness deficit, bullshit about compromised SSL connections is a criminal lie.
  - serverhorror 12y ago
    > "We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns" is a laughable statement to have issued. Why o why does "investigated this technology" even imply that somebody (technical) looked at it? Lead: Hey vendor, is your product secure? Vendor: Sure it is. It helps people find products they want. Lead: Aye! That's cool. Deal! Vendor: Aye! Let's hand it off to the mere mortals to implement the plan... Customer (formerly known as lead): Nice doing business with you. I like we have a relationship based on trust and honesty.
- eropple 12y ago
  This is not a mistake. This is an outright attack on the user, and it is straight-up disingenuous to claim it otherwise. Anybody can MitM any HTTPS connection coming from these laptops. Anybody! The private key is public knowledge! This is so transcendentally bad and so impossible to implement without understanding the consequences that somebody should go to jail for this. It is not a "mistake."
- mikeash 12y ago
  Their response is basically that this wasn't even a problem, but they'll still stop because people are making a big deal out of it for no reason and it's good to keep people happy, even when they're idiots. This seems like a pretty good reason to drop them. When you catch somebody misbehaving, and their response is "fine, I'll stop, but it wasn't a problem" then you can't trust them at all.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    > When you catch somebody misbehaving, and their response is "fine, I'll stop, but it wasn't a problem" then you can't trust them at all. Indeed. This kind of response is one of the most disrespectful things you can do to another person. "Hey, what are so upset about? Chill, it wasn't a big deal anyway!"
    - mikeash 12y ago
      I'm kind of impressed that their PR guys are so incompetent. Their statement is so nakedly condescending, they might as well have straight-up said, "You guys are full of shit, but we'll stop just so you'll shut up about it."
      - waps 12y ago
        If I was a lawyer, the basic requirement I'd have for a statement like this is to make it so it can't be construed as an admission of guilt, because that may later be used in court to extract damages. You probably should blame legal, not PR.
        mikeash 12y ago
        I'm certain that the legal requirements can be met without outright lying (or admitting to unbelievably gross incompetence). In fact, they seem to agree. I loaded the page just now, and "We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns." is no longer present in their statement. Their statement is still unbelievably condescending and awful (and none of that has any legal bearing that I can see) but they at least removed the part where they outright denied any security problem.
- throwawaymsft 12y ago
  A buffer overflow is a honest security mistake. This was a security sabotage.
- atweiden 12y ago
  > Why stop buying Thinkpads? Panasonic makes much higher quality hardware than Lenovo (and Apple for that matter). Panasonic also doesn't preload bloatware onto Windows. http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughbook/semi-rugged-laptop-toughbook-54.asp http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughbook/semi-rugged-lapt...
  - typedweb 12y ago
    No trackpoint.
- rmc 12y ago
  Punish bad behaviour. It will scare other other technology companies from doing this sort of thing again. If you switch to another company, you're rewarding the new company for not putting this spyware on their machines.
- Lawtonfogle 12y ago
  >What I see is a company willing to listen and admit their mistakes. Apply this to a human who did something similar. "I'm sorry I purposefully allowed my previous employer's systems to be infected by a virus in return for payment. I'm willing to admit it was a mistake and I've taken steps to correct it." Would you honestly hire someone like that to be a sysadmin?
- joshuapants 12y ago
  Bringing back the physical click buttons is a step in the right direction, but their recent drivers have ruined the middle mouse button for me. Can't use it both to scroll and middle click; you can either get scrolling or uninstall the driver and get middle click. There is a buggy piece of software called TPMiddle that lives on my X220 right now, but I'm jumping ship for my next laptop purchase.
- elchief 12y ago
  Stop calling stealing and lying "mistakes" you astroturfer
- chinathrow 12y ago
  That is not a mistake. That is a deliberate, well planned action done by management. If they had asked someone with a clue before, that wouldn't have happened.
jeletonskelly 12y ago
I love my Lenovo X1 Carbon. It's a really nice machine. I do run linux so I know I'm not the average user, but they haven't lost my business despite this being an epic screw-up. I think they make good machines and I'll continue to buy from them in the future, but I'll be reformatting immediately just like I've always done with any PC I've ever bought from Dell, Gateway, Lenovo, etc, so I don't have to deal with the bloat they put on their machine images.
- toolz 12y ago
  If they are willing to compromise you on a software level, what makes you think they aren't prepared to do so on the hardware level (presuming they already aren't).
  - notsony 12y ago
    At some point you're going to have to trust the vendor and the supply chain... unless you're prepared to build your own computer by soldering home-made components onto a bread-board! ;-)
    - joshuapants 12y ago
      It makes more sense to trust someone who hasn't already been caught abusing your trust.
      - blfr 12y ago
        You can make the opposite argument: since they screwed up, they will be more careful in the future. This kind of heuristic reasoning is pretty weak.
        EpicEng 12y ago
        "Screwing up" implies negligence, but not malicious intent. I think it's likely a bit of both. They did "screw up", i.e., the financial side of the business thought it was ok to hurt the user experience in order to make more money, and the engineering side was too incompetent to realize the security risk. Why would this level of demonstrated incompetence lead you to believe that they will be better in the future?
Alupis 12y ago
If you re-installed your OS and didn't use the factory image (which always includes other bloatware), then you were not affected. Or if you installed another OS (Linux, BSD, etc) then you were not affected. I love my thinkpad... but I've always paved over the factory image the moment I got my new laptop. This is egregious beyond a doubt, but it does not affect me so I'm not worried about buying more of their laptops.
- utxaa 12y ago
  but what if you're a windows user? is the backup image on the drive adware free?
  - unprepare 12y ago
    No, a windows user would have to buy a second copy of windows from microsoft and use that to install on the machine. Using Lenovo's recovery images will reinstall the same bloat that it originally came with
    - tunap 12y ago
      "No, a windows user would have to buy a second copy of windows from microsoft" Or procure a legit, OEM install disk/image and reload using the key affixed to the bottom* of the laptop. *Pre-8 days, now you get to "hope" the gUEFI recognizes the media and auto-populates the embedded key for you. When(not 'if' in my experience) it doesn't, then "buy more" is the only option outside of Linux.
      - unprepare 12y ago
        This is totally correct - I just meant that using Lenovos provided installation media would not resolve the issue. You can definitely use an OEM disk of your exact version with your printed serial. I too have had to procure new keys for win8 machines (did two last week that wouldn't recognize the keys on my machine)
        12y ago
scholia 12y ago
It was only installed on consumer laptops so you probably wouldn't have it anyway....
zamalek 12y ago
> Lenovo: One customer lost. More to be lost. Never purchased a Lenovo but I was bent on using one for my next machine. No longer. Their lies about it "not being a risk" have put the affected customers at immense risk.
- notsony 12y ago
  Doesn't matter what machine you're using if your ISP e.g. Comcast is injecting ads into the web pages you visit!
  - zamalek 12y ago
    Luckily this is not [yet] an issue where I live. I am an extremely deliberate consumer, though. I have evaluated competition and terminated contracts for far less than this. Just because others are doing it, does not make it right.
  - nvusuvu 12y ago
    Yes it does. No Lenovo for me.
sandGorgon 12y ago
Or simply wipe the HDD and reinstall OS.
- chinathrow 12y ago
  _I_ might be able to do so (well, frankly I am) but the point is, others are not.
gtirloni 12y ago
Lenovo is a hardware vendor. I suspect most of the HN crowd reinstalls something on their machines. The non-HN crowd won't even know about all of this (see the public response to NSA spying on American citizens, almost zero).
- chinathrow 12y ago
  All HN-crowd have friends, family and other folks who "don't know about that". And some of them bought those devices. But what the fucking fuck have people not understood about this issue? Someone might run open, free access points, sucking people in to connect and then they fucking MITM everything - inclusive that money transfer from your relative to you. How about that? Yes, you might be affected by this huge fuck up from Lenovo.
  - gtirloni 12y ago
    I think anyone exposed to the issue's details will understand it very easily. My point is that they won't (be exposed). The HN crowd is such an insignificant percentage of the overall population that I don't see how word of mouth will have any impact.
qzw 12y ago
Same here. I just ordered a Lenovo desktop 3 days ago for a family member. Seriously thinking about canceling the order now even though that machine should not be affected. I've been recommending Lenovo to lots of people, and I personally have a ThinkPad and a Yoga 2 Pro. I found the Superfish certificate on the Yoga this morning. This glib and dismissive statement is just adding insult to injury. As ambivalent as I am about lawsuits, I'm hoping Lenovo's management will get a class action right in its mendacious face.
- x0x0 12y ago
  I just can't let this statement pass. You don't support lawsuits (all those pricks abusing the courts, extorting money from companies!)... right up until the hot second a company screws you, and then the courts are an appropriate recourse. Maybe you could consider becoming a decent human being, learning some empathy, and realizing that perhaps other people have used the courts as recourse because they, too, were screwed by a company. Labeling lawsuits as an abuse of the court system or other laws is company defense 101.
  - qzw 12y ago
    Ok, I think you're assigning me to a camp in your head that I do not belong to. I'm not the corporation-loving, lawyer-hating, "tort-reforming" droid you're looking for. If you believe in the rule of law, which I do, then lawsuits are inevitable. There have been great lawsuits in history that have ensured freedom, ended injustice, and punished evil. But there have also been lawsuits used to bully, intimidate, and coerce. I assume you've heard of patent trolls? How about the SCO saga? How about the Scopes Monkey Trial? That's why I said I'm "ambivalent"[1] about them. [1]http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ambivalent http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ambivalent
    - x0x0 12y ago
      All of the above are a vast minority of lawsuits, and I read ambivalence as functionally equivalent to anti-tort. Again, you were ambivalent until your ox got gored.
somerandomness 12y ago
This actually never affected Thinkpads.
- dm2 12y ago
  You'd think people would at least check to see if they were even affected, it clearly states "Lenovo never installed this software on any ThinkPad notebooks, nor any Lenovo desktops or smartphones." and no enterprise products or servers. I'm giving Lenovo the benefit of the doubt here. Look at all the potentially malicious crap Dell, HP, Compaq, and others have installed on computers over the years. Any experienced computer user should know and want to wipe the hard-drive and reinstall as soon as you get the computer, preferably from trusted sources, I'm not sure Microsoft's rules on customizing their reinstall disk. I wouldn't trust the reinstall partition either. You have to also consider that the Chinese government might see all the news about NSA and US government hacking and intercepting hardware and they could require or secretly implement bugs into almost any Chinese made product, that's always been an unfortunate concern with Lenovo. If Lenovo would push for more open standards of all computer components and have independent parties verify their internal processes, then that would go a long way to improving their credibility after this incident.

Indeed. I have been buying IBM and then Lenovo Thinkpads for ages. I hate the thought that my next machine will be another brand. Lenovo: One customer lost. More to be lost.

notsony 12y ago

Why stop buying Thinkpads? Lenovo have acknowledged the issue and are now trying to resolve it. Everybody makes mistakes but how they fix those problems tells you a lot about the culture of the company. Lenovo also made a terrible mistake in removing the physical click buttons, but is now reintroducing them across their entire laptop range for 2015. What I see is a company willing to listen and admit their mistakes. Can the same be said of other vendors, such as Apple?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
badsock 12y ago
As part of "fixing their mistake" Lenovo just outright lied about the security implications. So what does that tell you about them?
eridius 12y ago
If I'm reading you correctly, you're making the argument that Lenovo, the company that was just discovered to have been intentionally shipping a massive security vulnerability on their laptops, is still thought of by you as listening to their users better than Apple, the company that would never in their wildest dreams even remotely consider the idea of putting something like Superfish on their computers, simply because Lenovo changed their minds and stopped shipping the security vulnerability? "Oh, no, my husband's a good man. He even promised to stop beating me!"
- notsony 12y ago
  Clearly Lenovo are stupid for bundling third-party ad-injection software, but who knows what Apple are doing behind closed doors? e.g. CarrierIQ in the baseband... etc.
  - eridius 12y ago
    Just to be clear, this is Apple, the company famous for putting user experience ahead of everything else (and often criticized by developers for putting user experience ahead of developer experience). Apple, the company that routinely tops customer satisfaction surveys. Apple, the company that has gone on the record time and time again about how user-focused they are. There are plenty of valid things to criticize Apple for, but accusing them of sneaking malware onto their devices is not one of them.
    - avn2109 12y ago
      This Lenovo press release is evidence neither for nor against Apple's malfeasance. But I think we can all agree that if Apple does bundle malware, that malware's user experience will be thoughtful, smooth, and superbly curated. /s
  - Lawtonfogle 12y ago
    Who knows what <insert person or company of choice> is doing behind closed doors? What am I doing behind closed doors? What are you doing behind closed doors? While there is a chance someone may be doing something bad behind closed doors, that cannot be used as a reason for why they are worse than someone whose door we have opened and found doing something bad.
Dylan16807 12y ago
They have acknowledged that the issue exists, but not what it actually is.
talkingquickly 12y ago
I'd argue that so far, that's exactly the point, their response makes it worse. "We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns" is a laughable statement to have issued. I can understand the legal reasons for not admitting to the security issues. But outright saying that they can't find anything to suggest they exist indicates a company I wouldn't want to do business with. To expand on that, in this case I know enough about the subject matter to understand that it's ridiculous to suggest there aren't security concerns. But I can't guarantee this will be the case for other problems. So going forward I'd probably avoid being a customer of a company who I have positive proof is prepared to issue blatantly incorrect statements about security issues.
- markokrajnc 12y ago
  I also had to laugh when Jobs started talking about "antenna gate". Instead of saying "We made a mistake here" he started saying "other phones have similar problems", etc. So his response wasn't good, but people still buy Apple and Apply is currently the largest company by market cap...
  - HelloNurse 12y ago
    An antenna doesn't pose a security hole. Bullshit about antennas in other phones is Apple's traditional humbleness deficit, bullshit about compromised SSL connections is a criminal lie.
- serverhorror 12y ago
  > "We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns" is a laughable statement to have issued. Why o why does "investigated this technology" even imply that somebody (technical) looked at it? Lead: Hey vendor, is your product secure? Vendor: Sure it is. It helps people find products they want. Lead: Aye! That's cool. Deal! Vendor: Aye! Let's hand it off to the mere mortals to implement the plan... Customer (formerly known as lead): Nice doing business with you. I like we have a relationship based on trust and honesty.
eropple 12y ago
This is not a mistake. This is an outright attack on the user, and it is straight-up disingenuous to claim it otherwise. Anybody can MitM any HTTPS connection coming from these laptops. Anybody! The private key is public knowledge! This is so transcendentally bad and so impossible to implement without understanding the consequences that somebody should go to jail for this. It is not a "mistake."
mikeash 12y ago
Their response is basically that this wasn't even a problem, but they'll still stop because people are making a big deal out of it for no reason and it's good to keep people happy, even when they're idiots. This seems like a pretty good reason to drop them. When you catch somebody misbehaving, and their response is "fine, I'll stop, but it wasn't a problem" then you can't trust them at all.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > When you catch somebody misbehaving, and their response is "fine, I'll stop, but it wasn't a problem" then you can't trust them at all. Indeed. This kind of response is one of the most disrespectful things you can do to another person. "Hey, what are so upset about? Chill, it wasn't a big deal anyway!"
  - mikeash 12y ago
    I'm kind of impressed that their PR guys are so incompetent. Their statement is so nakedly condescending, they might as well have straight-up said, "You guys are full of shit, but we'll stop just so you'll shut up about it."
    - waps 12y ago
      If I was a lawyer, the basic requirement I'd have for a statement like this is to make it so it can't be construed as an admission of guilt, because that may later be used in court to extract damages. You probably should blame legal, not PR.
      - mikeash 12y ago
        I'm certain that the legal requirements can be met without outright lying (or admitting to unbelievably gross incompetence). In fact, they seem to agree. I loaded the page just now, and "We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns." is no longer present in their statement. Their statement is still unbelievably condescending and awful (and none of that has any legal bearing that I can see) but they at least removed the part where they outright denied any security problem.
throwawaymsft 12y ago
A buffer overflow is a honest security mistake. This was a security sabotage.
atweiden 12y ago
> Why stop buying Thinkpads? Panasonic makes much higher quality hardware than Lenovo (and Apple for that matter). Panasonic also doesn't preload bloatware onto Windows. http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughbook/semi-rugged-laptop-toughbook-54.asp http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughbook/semi-rugged-lapt...
- typedweb 12y ago
  No trackpoint.
rmc 12y ago
Punish bad behaviour. It will scare other other technology companies from doing this sort of thing again. If you switch to another company, you're rewarding the new company for not putting this spyware on their machines.
Lawtonfogle 12y ago
>What I see is a company willing to listen and admit their mistakes. Apply this to a human who did something similar. "I'm sorry I purposefully allowed my previous employer's systems to be infected by a virus in return for payment. I'm willing to admit it was a mistake and I've taken steps to correct it." Would you honestly hire someone like that to be a sysadmin?
joshuapants 12y ago
Bringing back the physical click buttons is a step in the right direction, but their recent drivers have ruined the middle mouse button for me. Can't use it both to scroll and middle click; you can either get scrolling or uninstall the driver and get middle click. There is a buggy piece of software called TPMiddle that lives on my X220 right now, but I'm jumping ship for my next laptop purchase.
elchief 12y ago
Stop calling stealing and lying "mistakes" you astroturfer
chinathrow 12y ago
That is not a mistake. That is a deliberate, well planned action done by management. If they had asked someone with a clue before, that wouldn't have happened.

jeletonskelly 12y ago

I love my Lenovo X1 Carbon. It's a really nice machine. I do run linux so I know I'm not the average user, but they haven't lost my business despite this being an epic screw-up. I think they make good machines and I'll continue to buy from them in the future, but I'll be reformatting immediately just like I've always done with any PC I've ever bought from Dell, Gateway, Lenovo, etc, so I don't have to deal with the bloat they put on their machine images.

toolz 12y ago
If they are willing to compromise you on a software level, what makes you think they aren't prepared to do so on the hardware level (presuming they already aren't).
- notsony 12y ago
  At some point you're going to have to trust the vendor and the supply chain... unless you're prepared to build your own computer by soldering home-made components onto a bread-board! ;-)
  - joshuapants 12y ago
    It makes more sense to trust someone who hasn't already been caught abusing your trust.
    - blfr 12y ago
      You can make the opposite argument: since they screwed up, they will be more careful in the future. This kind of heuristic reasoning is pretty weak.
      - EpicEng 12y ago
        "Screwing up" implies negligence, but not malicious intent. I think it's likely a bit of both. They did "screw up", i.e., the financial side of the business thought it was ok to hurt the user experience in order to make more money, and the engineering side was too incompetent to realize the security risk. Why would this level of demonstrated incompetence lead you to believe that they will be better in the future?

Alupis 12y ago

If you re-installed your OS and didn't use the factory image (which always includes other bloatware), then you were not affected. Or if you installed another OS (Linux, BSD, etc) then you were not affected. I love my thinkpad... but I've always paved over the factory image the moment I got my new laptop. This is egregious beyond a doubt, but it does not affect me so I'm not worried about buying more of their laptops.

utxaa 12y ago
but what if you're a windows user? is the backup image on the drive adware free?
- unprepare 12y ago
  No, a windows user would have to buy a second copy of windows from microsoft and use that to install on the machine. Using Lenovo's recovery images will reinstall the same bloat that it originally came with
  - tunap 12y ago
    "No, a windows user would have to buy a second copy of windows from microsoft" Or procure a legit, OEM install disk/image and reload using the key affixed to the bottom* of the laptop. *Pre-8 days, now you get to "hope" the gUEFI recognizes the media and auto-populates the embedded key for you. When(not 'if' in my experience) it doesn't, then "buy more" is the only option outside of Linux.
    - unprepare 12y ago
      This is totally correct - I just meant that using Lenovos provided installation media would not resolve the issue. You can definitely use an OEM disk of your exact version with your printed serial. I too have had to procure new keys for win8 machines (did two last week that wouldn't recognize the keys on my machine)
      - 12y ago

scholia 12y ago

It was only installed on consumer laptops so you probably wouldn't have it anyway....

zamalek 12y ago

> Lenovo: One customer lost. More to be lost. Never purchased a Lenovo but I was bent on using one for my next machine. No longer. Their lies about it "not being a risk" have put the affected customers at immense risk.

notsony 12y ago
Doesn't matter what machine you're using if your ISP e.g. Comcast is injecting ads into the web pages you visit!
- zamalek 12y ago
  Luckily this is not [yet] an issue where I live. I am an extremely deliberate consumer, though. I have evaluated competition and terminated contracts for far less than this. Just because others are doing it, does not make it right.
- nvusuvu 12y ago
  Yes it does. No Lenovo for me.

sandGorgon 12y ago

Or simply wipe the HDD and reinstall OS.

chinathrow 12y ago
_I_ might be able to do so (well, frankly I am) but the point is, others are not.

gtirloni 12y ago

Lenovo is a hardware vendor. I suspect most of the HN crowd reinstalls something on their machines. The non-HN crowd won't even know about all of this (see the public response to NSA spying on American citizens, almost zero).

chinathrow 12y ago
All HN-crowd have friends, family and other folks who "don't know about that". And some of them bought those devices. But what the fucking fuck have people not understood about this issue? Someone might run open, free access points, sucking people in to connect and then they fucking MITM everything - inclusive that money transfer from your relative to you. How about that? Yes, you might be affected by this huge fuck up from Lenovo.
- gtirloni 12y ago
  I think anyone exposed to the issue's details will understand it very easily. My point is that they won't (be exposed). The HN crowd is such an insignificant percentage of the overall population that I don't see how word of mouth will have any impact.

qzw 12y ago

Same here. I just ordered a Lenovo desktop 3 days ago for a family member. Seriously thinking about canceling the order now even though that machine should not be affected. I've been recommending Lenovo to lots of people, and I personally have a ThinkPad and a Yoga 2 Pro. I found the Superfish certificate on the Yoga this morning. This glib and dismissive statement is just adding insult to injury. As ambivalent as I am about lawsuits, I'm hoping Lenovo's management will get a class action right in its mendacious face.

x0x0 12y ago
I just can't let this statement pass. You don't support lawsuits (all those pricks abusing the courts, extorting money from companies!)... right up until the hot second a company screws you, and then the courts are an appropriate recourse. Maybe you could consider becoming a decent human being, learning some empathy, and realizing that perhaps other people have used the courts as recourse because they, too, were screwed by a company. Labeling lawsuits as an abuse of the court system or other laws is company defense 101.
- qzw 12y ago
  Ok, I think you're assigning me to a camp in your head that I do not belong to. I'm not the corporation-loving, lawyer-hating, "tort-reforming" droid you're looking for. If you believe in the rule of law, which I do, then lawsuits are inevitable. There have been great lawsuits in history that have ensured freedom, ended injustice, and punished evil. But there have also been lawsuits used to bully, intimidate, and coerce. I assume you've heard of patent trolls? How about the SCO saga? How about the Scopes Monkey Trial? That's why I said I'm "ambivalent"[1] about them. [1]http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ambivalent http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ambivalent
  - x0x0 12y ago
    All of the above are a vast minority of lawsuits, and I read ambivalence as functionally equivalent to anti-tort. Again, you were ambivalent until your ox got gored.

somerandomness 12y ago

This actually never affected Thinkpads.

dm2 12y ago
You'd think people would at least check to see if they were even affected, it clearly states "Lenovo never installed this software on any ThinkPad notebooks, nor any Lenovo desktops or smartphones." and no enterprise products or servers. I'm giving Lenovo the benefit of the doubt here. Look at all the potentially malicious crap Dell, HP, Compaq, and others have installed on computers over the years. Any experienced computer user should know and want to wipe the hard-drive and reinstall as soon as you get the computer, preferably from trusted sources, I'm not sure Microsoft's rules on customizing their reinstall disk. I wouldn't trust the reinstall partition either. You have to also consider that the Chinese government might see all the news about NSA and US government hacking and intercepting hardware and they could require or secretly implement bugs into almost any Chinese made product, that's always been an unfortunate concern with Lenovo. If Lenovo would push for more open standards of all computer components and have independent parties verify their internal processes, then that would go a long way to improving their credibility after this incident.