Technology for Traveling
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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.
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You're confusing the issue again.
I'm assuming you are starting with a clean/fresh install of WINDOWS 8.1 with no Lenovo Crap on it! so, you wipe it.. and because you aren't going to install the Lenovo drives, you have no network access.
So you install a USB wireless card and the associated drivers, again on your clean install Windows 8.1 machine.
What's wrong with this setup? -
@Dashrender said:
You're confusing the issue again.
I'm assuming you are starting with a clean/fresh install of WINDOWS 8.1 with no Lenovo Crap on it! so, you wipe it.. and because you aren't going to install the Lenovo drives, you have no network access.
So you install a USB wireless card and the associated drivers, again on your clean install Windows 8.1 machine.
What's wrong with this setup?If we knew all of the facts at the time that would be a slightly less good version of what happened. We are in the same boat but updated to Windows 10 now.
I have no idea where you are going with this. The troubleshooting was done, the issue identified. Later another issue was identified. Why go back to Windows 8.1? I see no logic there. We don't want old Windows just to have it be old.
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Because I'm trying to understand - are the driver and the Superfish thing really one in the same?
I thought I heard that other vendors like Asus or Acer also included Superfish, but in digging around for a min or two I can't seem to find anything to corroborate that.
So I guess in the end what my point is - is finding out the Superfish only affected Lenovo and from what Scott is saying, it required both the shim'ed driver package and the software package on the machine, making these two components part of the same issue.
I had a complete misunderstanding of the problem before.
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@Dashrender said:
Because I'm trying to understand - are the driver and the Superfish thing really one in the same?
No reason to suspect otherwise. Why would the question get asked? Superfish worked by being a shim. The network driver had a shim. Unless you suspect that they did the same thing twice on the same boxes and no one noticed that there were TWO shims.
