Two Lawsuits Filed Against Lenovo Over Superfish Scandal

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thundervore

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And the lawsuits begin. I bet most of the people complaining about privacy invasion are freely giving this information away on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social sites.

Honestly, this will not put Lenovo in jeopardy. Major corporations who use Lenovo hardware wont care as they wipe the machines and place their own image on them and that makes up a bulk of their sales compared to the average customer buying a Lenovo laptop from Best Buy or Amazon.
 

Spoogemonkey

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These types of breach of public trust issues are very difficult to overcome in the eyes of consumers. As well they should be.

You can do a lot of crazy <mod edit> as a company and get away with it. This isn't one of them.

<Moderator Warning: Let's watch the language in these forums>
 

surphninja

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I support a number of users at the local district attorney's office that use Lenovos, and they are livid that so much confidential information could have potentially been compromised.

I wonder how many other government agencies and corporate customers were potentially affected. The hammer is going to come down hard on them for this.
 

burmese_dude

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Good. I hope Lenovo gets every penny stripped for pulling a stunt like that. First thing they should've done was to apologize and let the public know the clown/executive who thought this was a good idea has been fired with a kick in the behind.
 

therealduckofdeath

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surpninja? more like spinninja....
It's adware, not rootkits.

Furthermore, I don't know of a single government institution that doesn't use a custom install on their PC's. For this and many other reasons.
 

d_kuhn

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This is the clearest case of a company negligently putting their customers private information at risk in the name of making a buck I've ever seen... they're defeating secure http and sending users encrypted data (like banking data) insecurely just so they can inject sleazy adverts in your browser. Wow... just wow.
 

NotProfit

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therealduckofdeath.... just how many government agencies have you been involved with? Even the department of defense had these floating around. Stupid? Yes. Unsafe? Oh yeah. Negligence on the part of the consumer? Sure.

Is Lenovo really responsible? Hard to say.... but I do know it's ridiculous to say the consumer is at fault for not buying a second OS license key when they've already paid for the first one, and no, the key that comes with your Lenovo can't be activated on a new fresh copy of Windows, not even over the phone. Only the included disk (or downloaded from Lenovo FTP) which still has superfish. Just my experience over the last month.
 

surphninja

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There are many different circumstances in which a government pc would use the factory image. I'm not going to get into the details on exactly what happened in this case, but you should call Lenovo and ask what's necessary to transfer the license to a new image. Good luck.
 
G

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I think that Lenovo is about to figure out just saying "there's no problem" just isn't going to cut it.

I'm pretty sure most of their business comes from corporations, which just aren't going to put up with this. It doesn't matter if this was on consumer laptops only. A reputation is pretty easy to destroy, and this has just done it.
 

therealduckofdeath

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I've worked for both Dell and HP in the past. The public sector doesn't walk into the local store to buy a new lappie with the pre-installed OEM software, for the new guy. They buy them in bulk, and these days the manufacturers even offer custom preloaded installs in those cases they don't feel like doing that themselves. They also usually follow a strict software policy like ITIL, where nothing not extensively tested is allowed on their computers.

I know it's fun to spread FUD on the internet. Because you can come up with any wild anecdotal story and say it's "facts".
 

jalek

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Lenovo should re-establish trust and join with the NSA to offer privacy-protecting encryption as solid as Admiral Mike Rogers thinks it should be. What could possibly go wrong?
 

thundervore

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I worked for many big companies in the past and they did buy the machines in bulk straight from the company by the pallets, they were never trusted to load the OS the company used onto the machines. Fact is, if a company has a decent IT staff they will load their own image on the machine, they will not half-ass it and expect the company to do their work for them as things like this can happen.

Besides large companies have volume licensing for the OS. So they are not paying for a new license, they are simply reusing an old license that is no longer in use. The only one who will feel the pain of this is normal consumers not corporations.
 

surphninja

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I've worked for the vendor side as well, and I know that is usually the case. Now I work on the public sector side, and I can tell you that there are often exceptions. Usually, it's an issue of where the funding's coming from or whether the departments go through the correct channels or not. For instance, for some strange reason, any new toys bought with civil forfeiture funds tend to be acquired outside the usual channels. And more than a handful of times I've been expected to work magic on supporting laptops that office managers went down and bought at the Costco. I wish it never happened, because the odd equipment like this is a pain in the a** to support, but it happens all the time.
 

shriganesh

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Good! At least people are noticing and taking action!

@thundervore
Are you insane? Who posts their online bank credentials on social pages? Also if we use Google products for free, Google is giving us something in return for free (like free apps, cloud capacity etc). But for Lenovo, we've paid some good cash upfront for their devices. It's not like Lenovo laptops are extremely cheaper than it's competitors.

@therealduckofdeath
FYI those custom installs don't involve any ROOT certificate installation nor products which intercept SSL connections.
 
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