> We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns.

I work at a large Telco/ISP and I understand how this kind of thing happens (though I'm not excusing it).

First they come to the tech people and we explain exactly what's going on. Our managers translate it so they can understand it, and push it up with their name on it. Those Directors translate it so they can understand it and push it up with their name on it. The VPs dumb it down a bit, put their name on it and push it sideways to communications, where it goes all the way back "down" the organizational structure until someone actually makes the press release. By that time sometimes the release isn't even about the same original thing anymore.

Our company puts out press releases all the time and us tech people just shake our heads at how inaccurate and plain wrong they are.

EDIT: As Kurtz79 points out, I forgot the step where it gets translated through Legal/PR before it goes down to communications.

To be honest, it seems something coming out of PR/Lawyer guys rather than actual engineers.

I mean, the statement is pretty clear and leaves little room for doubt, it would take a lot of simplification and misunderstanding to twist a proper technical analysis (provided it has been done, or even asked) to this level.

> I mean, the statement is pretty clear and leaves little room for doubt

That's how you know it isn't from an engineer. We always leave a little room for doubt e.g.

"I'm 90% sure this will work!"

That's why engineers don't write PR statements.

It's also important to understand that in a case like this, upper management likely _wants_ the money from installing this on laptops (or their bosses do, or their boss's bosses do, and so on), so while they may act in good faith in translating the technical impacts of software like this to their management, they likely translate with a slight, unbeknownst to them bias.

It's pretty similar to what Comcast are doing by injecting ads into the web pages you visit.

Perhaps the real problem is that tech companies hire too many product/marketing managers, resulting in them having to cook up ridiculous money-making schemes in order to justify their own existence.

> Perhaps the real problem is that tech companies hire too many product/marketing managers, resulting in them having to cook up ridiculous money-making schemes in order to justify their own existence.

You have hit the proverbial nail very squarely on the head.

Here is it should have been written:

> We have thoroughly investigated this technology and please don't sue us.

> Our company puts out press releases all the time and us tech people just shake our heads at how inaccurate and plain wrong they are.

And that doesn't make it right, honest, or excusable.

Reminds me of "The Plan": http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/waterstraat/how_the_plan_be... and many other places around the net.

Speaking of Lenovo being full of shit, there's also this gem:

> The relationship with Superfish is not financially significant; our goal was to enhance the experience for users.

Right. You loaded adware onto users' computers, not for financial gain, but to enhance the experience for them.

There's also the difference between what they say:

  "We will not preload *this* software in the future."

and what they don't say:

  "We will not preload *such* software in the future."

(Emphasis added)

The entirely fictitious:

[Superfish technology sends your data to a third party ad server. We then use this data to create behavioral profiles on you, we process this data, and we monitor it. Finally we record all this data in our backups for up to 10 years.]

is consistent with:

To be clear, Superfish technology is purely based on contextual/image and not behavioral. It does not profile nor monitor user behavior. It does not record user information. It does not know who the user is.

edit: clarified.

Where is the first line from?

Pretty egregious misrepresentation from Lenovo if that's true.

I've been thinking about this. If I put my tinfoil hat on, I think they're telling the truth.

> The relationship with Superfish is not financially significant;

Again, with my tinfoil hat on, I believe this. I believe that either Israeli (check out Superfish's background and connections) or Chinese governmental groups have forced Lenovo into loading this awful malware onto its machines.

> our goal was to enhance the experience for users.

Not their goal in loading adware, but their goal in general. They are drawing a line (or semicolon) between what they wanted to do, and what the dark and mysterious forces behind Superfish forced them to do.

Again, tinfoil hat. This is all very conspiracy theory-ish.

I totally detest such language.

This was the greatest part of the whole document. Absolutely freaking hilarious.

Ads? No, this is extra, potentially relevant information! And at no extra cost!

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.

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?

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.

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...

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.

> "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.

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."

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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

As part of "fixing their mistake" Lenovo just outright lied about the security implications. So what does that tell you about them?

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.

> 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!"

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."

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.

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.

>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?

A buffer overflow is a honest security mistake. This was a security sabotage.

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.

Stop calling stealing and lying "mistakes" you astroturfer

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.

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.

> 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-lapt...

No trackpoint.

They have acknowledged that the issue exists, but not what it actually is.

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.

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).

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! ;-)

It makes more sense to trust someone who hasn't already been caught abusing your trust.

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.

"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?

The fact that they've gone from minor user-unfriendly features to major violations of trust doesn't speak well to their learning ability or consumer care, however.

In a company as big as Lenovo, I'd be kind of surprised if the person or persons who decide what bloatware to load onto the consumer image make any sort of hardware decisions.

There's also that this particular kind of compromise is basically inapplicable to hardware. What are they going to do, put a 3G radio in your laptop that broadcasts your "data" via the cell network to Belarus?

This provides some details :

http://thehackernews.com/2015/02/hard-drive-firmware-hacking...

So no, they'll get a rootkit process running on your machine and (for instance) upload everything on your hard drive through your web browser.

Another thing they've done is to upload hacked drivers to cause other hardware connected to the infected machine to physically destroy itself.

There's a big difference between Lenovo selling bloatware rights to an adware company and the NSA (or whoever) bugging some hard drives.

Is that spyware Windows-specific?

There's a huge difference between bloat and malicious advertising software that creates real security holes that are invisible to the average user.

What about the hardware level, which you cannot easily cleanup without knowing the full details of. If they're willing to try another route.

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.

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.

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

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.

You might have withheld your hostility if you had first double-checked the definition of "ambivalent".

It does not mean or imply "opposed" or "disdainful" or "disinterested", at all.

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.

I love mine too, but this makes me pause. If they were willing to do something like this in software, what's to say they wouldn't do something that you couldn't just flash away? Like an 'enhanced user experience' BIOS. or hardware component? You can't just reformat those.

The, it didn't effect me because I reformatted is kind of a "First they came for the communists..." argument.

It doesn't matter, if _I_ was affected or not. It matters that thousands of others _are_ affected and that I fucking care what my friends and family run.

Oh and that I run a website over https matters too. I want that all users have the same expectation what that means.

I've always been curious about how this work. If I buy a Win machine and want to keep Win (say to dual-boot), how do I do this? Buy a second OS disk? Torrent one and use my key?

I get it if I'm wiping out and putting on Linux or something, but that always seems like I'm wasting something I've already bought.

You don't have to "waste" the windows license key you purchased... it allows you to do a fresh install and just use that key. You can use any windows ISO or disk to do the fresh install. In fact I think somewhere you can download the Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 ISO's directly from Microsoft.

OK great- that was exactly what I was asking. The 'backup' files they ask me to make re-installs the original state of the machine- I assume that includes crapware. Thanks.

but what if you're a windows user? is the backup image on the drive adware free?

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

It's actually much easier than that - no secondary purchase is required with Windows 8

https://www.thurrott.com/uncategorized/1146/clean-pc-walkthr...

thanks! i have an X1 carbon en route - will try this as soon as i open the box.

"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.

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)

Windows Vista and up did away with special OEM ISO/Disks. You can use your OEM license with any official ISO/Disk.

What you may of had issue with was your OEM license being activated too many times -- if that happens, the automatic online activation will not work. You must use the phone number to activate your license, and it will ask "how many computers is this license installed on"... of course you just give the answer "one" and it activates it with no problem.

"Windows Vista and up did away with special OEM ISO/Disks. You can use your OEM license with any official ISO/Disk."

Are you referring to all flavors(Home Basic/Home Premium/Pro/Ultimate) from one disk? Installing retail/OEM from one disk has never been the case in my experience, though I have limited experience with 'retail' installs. I joined TechNet ~6 years back to obtain ISOs to reload various x32/x64/Vista/7 installs, but none of the machines' OEM keys I tried would work with the TN ISO's. If I'm not mistaken, they were specifically 'retail' ISOs.

> Are you referring to all flavors(Home Basic/Home Premium/Pro/Ultimate) from one disk? Installing retail/OEM from one disk has never been the case in my experience

No, Home/Pro/Ultimate are separate disks -- but OEM/Retail are exactly the same thing. You have to phone in your activation however, since OEM keys usually do not automatically activate over the internet.

Vista and up, there is no such thing as an OEM ISO image. XP had that and it was a great pain for support...

If you mean OEM in the sense of the pre-installed image on your recovery partition... that's not an "OEM" install in the same sense as the XP disks were... that's a customized image either made by something like nLite or installed on a generic factory laptop, pre-loaded with garbage, ran sysprep (to genericsize it) and imaged to a file.

The recovery image/factory image does not use the license on the bottom of your laptop usually -- it uses a factory volume license key that is pre-activated on the image. However if you try to recover that key with some key extractor, and use it to activate another installation from an official ISO, it will not work -- ie. that license will only activate at the factory. If you use the license from the bottom of your laptop, you need a genuine microsoft iso.

So long as you have a Windows 7 Pro license key on the bottom of your laptop, and use a Windows 7 Pro ISO, it will work.. or Home and Home, etc...

To clarify, I was not speaking of recovery/restore, just clean installs of Windows sans vendor bloat... & h/w drivers.

And... you appear to be absolutely correct.

"Vista and up, there is no such thing as an OEM ISO image. XP had that and it was a great pain for support..."

I was not aware OEM & RETAIL installation media were merged, cannot locate any search results verifying this, but I cannot find any recent issues being discussed either. Site where I buy software still has the categories distinguished & separate, but I never considered the media became one and the same w/ only distinction being the key itself(and all rights afforded Retail over OEM). I had numerous problems installing 7 when it appeared on consumer devices before I did any machine builds w/ 7(and made images of installation media that came with their licenses), hence my subscribing to TechNet(R.I.P.) before Digital River links became ubiquitous... and yeah, I have a dozen+ variants of XP due both to it's OEM/RETAIL duality plus the never-ending sfc /scannow prompt: "please insert original installation media" if XP received any Service Packs since original installation.

I do now recall unlocking Vista & 7 disks to install any flavor now that you mention nLight... another contributor to my lapse. Plus, I did find official MS pages that support your last point on unique disks for each flavor... I thought it was just for Enterprise.

EDIT:

"You have to phone in your activation however, since OEM keys usually do not automatically activate over the internet."

After activation failure, you can opt to insert a different key & retype the same key a 2nd time for online activation. That always irked me, I thought it was a bug.

> Site where I buy software still has the categories distinguished & separate,

Typically the "OEM" purchase of the ISO Disk comes in just a plain white envelope (with COA sticker somewhere on it) and "no official microsoft support" since it's intended for "systems builders" who microsoft expects to have their own support for consumers. A lot of people who build their own rigs choose this option because the "OEM" package is usually $10-$30 cheaper. The "Retail" packaging just comes with the fancy case with color inserts, etc... and "official microsft support".

If you are building your own rig, you're probably unlikely to call Microsoft for anything. If you are some company's internal-IT, you're unlikely to call Microsoft for anything.... Heck, if you are installing your own Windows installation, you're unlikely to call Microsoft for anything... So i just always buy the "OEM" packaging when I need a new license.

So the difference there is really just the packaging the ISO/Disk comes in and whether or not it has "official" support by Microsoft. Otherwise the ISO image on the disk is identical. :)

It might affect you. Your friends/families traffic on these machines are suspectible to a MITM. Rogue access points, etc etc are a problem these days.

So, that communication your girlfriend might send you over https is not private any longer.

Go figure.

> 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.

Doesn't matter what machine you're using if your ISP e.g. Comcast is injecting ads into the web pages you visit!

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.

Yes it does. No Lenovo for me.

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

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).

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.

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.

This actually never affected Thinkpads.

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.

Or simply wipe the HDD and reinstall OS.

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

I imagine Lenovo wants to tell you the truth but has the CCP's tank barrels pointed at their back. Further evidence that buying from autocratic regimes comes at a risk. I wouldn't run Kaspersky either, especially after Wired exposed their connections to the FSB and Russian military.

http://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/all/

If this was going on with a US OEM, people would assume the NSA. But with Lenovo (which the US government refuses to buy btw) and Huwai and other non-vendors for the USG, HN'ers have regularly defended them and claimed the US was being paranoid or protectionist. How the hell do you think a fucking MITM gets onto a production image? This is financial suicide for Lenovo and they know it. This has all the telltale signs of government collusion. The CCP has a lot more to gain from stuff like this than Lenovo has to lose. How many people have been compromised from ship date until the day this gets uninstalled? Millions? For how many months? Years? That's a lot of SSL sniffing available to the CCP.

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.

No 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-iphon...

Apple 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.

Quite 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.

> 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.

Apple 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

Given that Apple has made a priority of elevating convenience above security, I'm not sure how seriously to take Cook on the subject of the importance of privacy and security.

Gen. Alexander's talk at Def Con 2012 sounded pretty earnest, too...

Actually, 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.

Apple 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.

The 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.

I 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?

I 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.

Many 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?

The 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.

Well, 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".

"Hey siri" is only enabled when your phone is plugged in, and it processes that particular phrase on device, not across a network.

If remember correctly their devices were sending back GPS coordinates to a server too?

The difference being that only Apple (and the us gov) can listen in, not the entire world.

Huh? How so?

The 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).

Plus, 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?

Lenovo 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...

You 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.

You mean like with spotlight in Yosemite?

I'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.

I 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).

I 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.

Tell me about it! Apple is user hostile in much more subtle ways.

Didn't Apple do just that with Antennagate?

Apple 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.

I think we just found out where Baghdad Bob works nowadays.

No evidence of security concerns, you say, Lenovo!? Well then your entire C-suite will put their money where their mouth is by browsing with these "uncompromised" machines for the forseeable future, right? Banking, signing in to their hospital's website, logging in to corporate sites...

Wait, your IT department just frantically rolled out clean disk images to the whole org? That's a funny coincidence...

It's quite possible that the muckety-mucks who signed off on this in the first place were unaware of the implications. But at this point, the technical details should be known even to the clueless pointy-hair types.

It's probable that their lawyers told them to make this claim to lessen their exposure to lawsuits. If they admitted any kind of problem they'd be in hot water, but now the burden is on anyone bringing a suit to prove them wrong.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

It seems they have removed this statement completely. Unless you meant here: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-P-Y-and-Z-series/Removal-...

Well to be honest I've worked with OEM's before.

They are so big and bureaucratic, half the time they don't know who is working on what.

This behavior is still inexcusable.

Somebody should be fired for putting this garbage on computers to "enhance the users experience."

Is there a proof of concept that exploits this ?

Close:

http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/02/extracting-superfish-certi...