Lenovo Ushers in a New Era of Mobile Workstation Power and Performance with Lenovo ThinkPad P50 and P70
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Was this shim found in the Business Class units from Lenovo?
Superfish was on several vendor machines, pretty sure it had nothing to do with shiming the driver itself.
The Driver shim you reported many months ago was limited to only one manufacturer, I thought, and only the consumer line.. not that that is an excuse.
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@Dashrender said:
Was this shim found in the Business Class units from Lenovo?
No, just the Yogas. Which are sold for business but they classify as consumer (and used that as the excuse for why this was okay.) We live in an era where tablet and laptop devices are not strictly classified or used in that way (what are Apple MacBooks, for example, which are the same as the Yogas.) To excuse their actions, Lenovo didn't have a business class unit, the Yoga 2 was the only one for business.
So I actually feel that this makes this worse, rather than better, because it feels like another layer of intent.
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I agree with your feeling!
Though, do you believe that they can never be trusted again?
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@Dashrender said:
Superfish was on several vendor machines, pretty sure it had nothing to do with shiming the driver itself.
The Driver shim you reported many months ago was limited to only one manufacturer, I thought, and only the consumer line.. not that that is an excuse.
Yes, Superfish in the network driver was limited to this one vendor. That's why it is such a big deal that Lenovo was doing this.
It was super apparent that they were going to get caught. This was clearly them testing the waters to see how much they could get away with. They used a consumer device, I assume, in the hopes that they would get farther without getting caught and have an excuse (and lots of fans to back them up and media vendors to pay off for PR) as to why this wasn't a big intentional scam.
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@Dashrender said:
Though, do you believe that they can never be trusted again?
Without a doubt, I could never trust them again. There are accidents, there are mistakes and there is this. I cannot fathom the rationale of anyone willing to do business with them after this. This isn't a bad business move, this was completely criminal. It would be liking hiring an employee that you just caught breaking into your house to rob you.
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And for us, this wasn't even an isolated incident. If you remember, people were upset that I was mentioning legal action against them before we caught them doing this, which was months before they had enough pressure that they had to admit what they were doing. So as far as I am concerned, they had the beginnings of a track record of some pretty devious behaviour. It feels like they have a corporate mentality of "do whatever you can get away with."
Like any vendor, they have fanboys who will help to cover for anything that they do wrong. And they have deep pockets to pay off the marketing firms and media firms to make people mentioning what they have done wrong seem silly.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Though, do you believe that they can never be trusted again?
Without a doubt, I could never trust them again. There are accidents, there are mistakes and there is this. I cannot fathom the rationale of anyone willing to do business with them after this. This isn't a bad business move, this was completely criminal. It would be liking hiring an employee that you just caught breaking into your house to rob you.
But when I say shit like this, everyone assumes I'm off the effing deep end crazy / paranoid / whatever. Lenovo now occupies the same "deserves to be kicked down a bunch of stairs" space where I put politicians...
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@RojoLoco said:
But when I say shit like this, everyone assumes I'm off the effing deep end crazy / paranoid / whatever. Lenovo now occupies the same "deserves to be kicked down a bunch of stairs" space where I put politicians...
I got called crazy when I was complaining about them not delivering the tablet and then when we discovered the network shim. Months later it becomes public that they are totally dishonest and not to be trusted.
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Can someone "explain it like i'm 5" why you need this kind of power in a mobile workstation? It seems like complete overkill for me.
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@s.hackleman said:
Can someone "explain it like i'm 5" why you need this kind of power in a mobile workstation? It seems like complete overkill for me.
No one can because no one does, really.
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I agree, someone somewhere must need crazy power in a mobile device but it is very, very rare. Mostly it is just people with too much money to spend or businesses that don't look into this stuff carefully enough and people convince their managers to get these things for them as a badge of pride that they could get something so expensive.
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Wow. Just.... wow. That anyone is willing to do business with them anymore is mind boggling to me. What would entice someone to let their salesman in the door? The lengths that they will go to are unthinkable.
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i like my lenovo laptop....
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From that link:
"That turns out to be a method Microsoft introduced with Windows 8 to allow the BIOS to execute code on boot up (!?!) called "Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT)""Isn't that the whole reason UEFI exists, so we can't have that happen?
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@hubtechagain I have a Lenovo that I got for free, however it has Linux on it so I think I'm ok?
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@johnhooks said:
Isn't that the whole reason UEFI exists, so we can't have that happen?
No, UEFI exists to promote Windows lock in.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Isn't that the whole reason UEFI exists, so we can't have that happen?
No, UEFI exists to promote Windows lock in.
I guess I should rephrase that, wasn't that the proposed reason, so only verified code could run?
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@johnhooks said:
@hubtechagain I have a Lenovo that I got for free, however it has Linux on it so I think I'm ok?
We got one for free, I'm not impressed with it at all. I'm surprised that they decided to give something away that would not be impressive. So as a Lenovo owner I'm like "even for free, we aren't happy". Nothing is less impressive than only being marginally useful for free.
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@johnhooks said:
I guess I should rephrase that, wasn't that the proposed reason, so only verified code could run?
Yes, Microsoft verified code, not code for you. It's basically designed to promote malware that someone has paid the vendors to approve.
