Technology for Traveling
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@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller also what problems did you have with Lenovo?
Lenovo broke the public trust by not once, not twice, but three times doing things to inject adware into their computers.
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Network driver had built in shim to allow ads, etc to be injected. This driver could not be replaced because the hardware was setup to require something specific in the driver in order to work. Generic drivers would not function.
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SuperFish - Lenovo included crapware without vetting it on behalf of their customers. This crapware left your machine open to all kinds of badness on the internet
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BIOS reinstalls Lenovo tools - Lenovo used a BIOS hack if required or a new MS allowable configuration to reinstall Lenovo tools on your computer after you installed a Clean version of Windows.
*This one is not really so egregious as the first two, but many people were upset about it and Lenovo didn't have any documentation about it, nor a way to disable it by default.
These things show that Lenovo does not have your privacy in mind when selling you their equipment. They only care about the all mighty dollar.
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The Levono issues had to be the biggest IT news items this year. All over the media outlets plus lots of threads in any given community. It gets brought up every two weeks or so for one reason or another.
Here is one of your threads where we were talking about it:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty/
http://mangolassi.it/topic/2787/can-t-join-lenovo-yoga-2-pro-with-windows-10-pro-to-active-directory <-- issue that we had that turned out to be Superfish breaking the machine
http://mangolassi.it/topic/2761/new-lenovo-laptop-won-t-allow-posting-to-mango-lassi <-- another technical issue where Superfish broke the networking
http://mangolassi.it/topic/2721/lenovo-runs-scam-contest-at-spiceworld <-- pre-Superfish legal issues with Lenovo
http://mangolassi.it/topic/5767/lenovo-sales-down-50-layoffs-begin
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Wait a second - I thought you (@scottalanmiller) showed Lenovo was installing a shim'ed driver that was outside the SuperFish thing? i.e. you completely reinstall windows from scratch (deleted old partitions/data first, then reinstalled Windows)?
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@Dashrender said:
Wait a second - I thought you (@scottalanmiller) showed Lenovo was installing a shim'ed driver that was outside the SuperFish thing? i.e. you completely reinstall windows from scratch (deleted old partitions/data first, then reinstalled Windows)?
No, I've been saying over and over again that the Superfish stuff was done as a network shim. That's what it was. It was because Superfish was a broken shim that we discovered it. It was implemented in the driver, so even doing a fresh install reinstalled it because the only drivers for the native OS were ones with the shim in it.
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We HAD to go to Windows 10 rather than Windows 8.1 to get away from the lack of non-shimmed drivers.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Wait a second - I thought you (@scottalanmiller) showed Lenovo was installing a shim'ed driver that was outside the SuperFish thing? i.e. you completely reinstall windows from scratch (deleted old partitions/data first, then reinstalled Windows)?
No, I've been saying over and over again that the Superfish stuff was done as a network shim. That's what it was. It was because Superfish was a broken shim that we discovered it. It was implemented in the driver, so even doing a fresh install reinstalled it because the only drivers for the native OS were ones with the shim in it.
Now I'm really lost - so there are two versions of Superfish? 1) where it was implemented in the driver and no other software required, and 2) software that installed a network shim that had nothing to do with the driver?
I thought people had this Superfish problem who didn't have the driver issue? But maybe I'm reading to much into it.
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@Dashrender said:
I thought people had this Superfish problem who didn't have the driver issue? But maybe I'm reading to much into it.
Many people didn't notice the shim and just thought that sites and stuff didn't work. Normal end users don't know what shims look like. You are mixing technical and non-technical reports together and getting confused.
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@Dashrender said:
Now I'm really lost - so there are two versions of Superfish? 1) where it was implemented in the driver and no other software required, and 2) software that installed a network shim that had nothing to do with the driver?
How would you make a network shim that wasn't in a driver? The shim is part of the Lenovo drivers.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Now I'm really lost - so there are two versions of Superfish? 1) where it was implemented in the driver and no other software required, and 2) software that installed a network shim that had nothing to do with the driver?
How would you make a network shim that wasn't in a driver? The shim is part of the Lenovo drivers.
But it doesn't have to be. That's my point. Superfish for example was found on more than just Lenovo computers. Are you telling me that all of those vendors did exactly what Lenovo did and baked the shim into the NIC driver?
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@scottalanmiller said:
We HAD to go to Windows 10 rather than Windows 8.1 to get away from the lack of non-shimmed drivers.
you did? Why? I thought you installed a third party NIC (USB) into the system to solve this problem? Why do you assume the Lenovo driver for Windows 10 doesn't have the shim in it, assuming going to Windows 10 allowed you to use the internal NIC with an MS provided driver.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
We HAD to go to Windows 10 rather than Windows 8.1 to get away from the lack of non-shimmed drivers.
you did? Why? I thought you installed a third party NIC (USB) into the system to solve this problem? Why do you assume the Lenovo driver for Windows 10 doesn't have the shim in it, assuming going to Windows 10 allowed you to use the internal NIC with an MS provided driver.
That was to get working hardware. The Lenovo wireless hardware doesn't work. That's an unrelated issue.
There is no Lenovo Windows 10 driver. Going to Windows 10 allowed us to use Microsoft drivers that worked.
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So one of the best discoveries of our new Amazon Fire TV.... all of the videos that we have uploaded to Amazon Cloud Drive as our backup mechanism suddenly appear on the Fire TV and we can just watch them as if they were another streaming service! So our own library that has been stored, thus far, on a NAS in the US just have to be uploaded to ACD and our Fire TV makes them available to us when we travel! Huge win!!
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Is that unlimited storage too, like their picture storage?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
We HAD to go to Windows 10 rather than Windows 8.1 to get away from the lack of non-shimmed drivers.
you did? Why? I thought you installed a third party NIC (USB) into the system to solve this problem? Why do you assume the Lenovo driver for Windows 10 doesn't have the shim in it, assuming going to Windows 10 allowed you to use the internal NIC with an MS provided driver.
That was to get working hardware. The Lenovo wireless hardware doesn't work. That's an unrelated issue.
There is no Lenovo Windows 10 driver. Going to Windows 10 allowed us to use Microsoft drivers that worked.
You couldn't install the USB NIC into Windows 8.1?
I know the pain you dealt with - I purchased a replacement internal WIFI AC card and it's been golden ever since!
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@Dashrender said:
You couldn't install the USB NIC into Windows 8.1?
I assume that replacing the hardware would have us to potentially bypassed it. But having a fully compromised system is never a good idea. It's like having a thief in a room and just saying "be sure not to use that room." Better to clean house rather than avoiding the room.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
You couldn't install the USB NIC into Windows 8.1?
I assume that replacing the hardware would have us to potentially bypassed it. But having a fully compromised system is never a good idea. It's like having a thief in a room and just saying "be sure not to use that room." Better to clean house rather than avoiding the room.
But you could simply not install the Lenovo driver either, wouldn't solve your problem?
Are you still stuck using a USB wireless NIC?
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Lenovo made the sole driver for the hardware.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Lenovo made the sole driver for the hardware.
Yes, just don't install it... i.e. leave the hardware unused. therefore you have no thief to worry about - assuming you're stuck using a USB wireless card anyway... I'm assuming that's what you are doing in Windows 10.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Lenovo made the sole driver for the hardware.
Yes, just don't install it... i.e. leave the hardware unused. therefore you have no thief to worry about - assuming you're stuck using a USB wireless card anyway... I'm assuming that's what you are doing in Windows 10.
- We couldn't know that the hardware was flaky until we had the software working.
- Not leaving known malware on the system. No way, even today, how much malware Lenovo had installed or was attempting to get on there. Or how deep it goes. No way to be confident that that driver does not touch other things.
If this was any end user and they knew that they had been rooted, our answer every time is that they need to reinstall clean. This is no different, not a special case. Leaving a root kit and software from a known malicious entity on there would be completely unacceptable.
