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Comment by whytaka | Hacker News Reader

Time and time again, I cannot believe people recommend a company that installed spyware in their hardware.

I will never ever buy a Lenovo. It doesn't matter that it didn't affect the ThinkPad line.

Almost every larger company these days has done something bad like that. Lenovo had superfish, HP had a keylogger, Dell had its own superfish, Acer still installs search toolbars and browser hijackers, depending on how far back you want to go Sony had the BMG rootkit and a camera backdoor, ... Who are you going to get your laptop from now of you ignore all of those - especially if you're going to reinstall your OS immediately anyway?

> Who are you going to get your laptop from now of you ignore all of those - especially if you're going to reinstall your OS immediately anyway?

Clevo. They are a whitebox laptop manufacturer so you will find they are OEM for several smaller brands like MSI, Sager, and others. Yes they are Chinese market, but every laptop is made in China these days, even the big American names, so that part is unavoidable. If that truly is an issue you can't get around, you'll be happy to know that System76 is moving towards producing its devices in house in the United States[1], though I have no idea if the recent tariff wars have affected that situation.

[1] https://opensource.com/article/18/4/system76-us-manufacturin...

Clevo's hardware is not that great though. I've known several people get System76 Clevo systems and they've all been disappointed. I'm hopeful for System76's new systems, that they will up the quality significantly and make them compare-able to Thinkpads.

Yes, I had a Clevo-produced System76 model and I've had multiple hardware issues with it -- for starters, it failed to POST just days after receiving it, and System76 support did repair it, but they were not very accommodating about it, saying there was no way for them to provide a shipping method faster than ground even if I paid for it, etc. I want to like System76, but the truth is that my experience with them was disappointing.

It may depend on the model; this guy got a lot of mileage out of his Clevo-made laptop:

https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2017/07/openbsd-and-modern-laptop...

Almost every company? Except the one this thread is about...

According to https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8912714/Apple-i... "An unpatched security flaw in Apple’s iTunes software allowed intelligence agencies and police to hack into users’ computers for more than three years" which sounds serious to me if you're an iTunes user (as I guess many Mac and Windows users are).

But I think the real culprit is that all of the organizations the grandparent poster listed distribute proprietary software which is untrustworthy to begin with. Proprietary malware isn't hard to find (see https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ for an organized set of links) whether it came with the OS pre-installed on the computer or installed later. So long as it adversely affects the user and leaves the user with no permission to inspect, alter, and share the software (only permission to run the malware) the situation is bad.

I listed other companies which did just as bad things. Why would you trust (for example) Dell more than Lenovo in this case?

The thread is about Apple.

They already have that data..

That we we know about.

Well that response could be used to justify about any conspiracy theory.

How about we stick to the facts we know, which is that all manufacturers but Apple have done these incredibly user hostile things.

With the amount of attention on them, if they did it, it’s bound to come out sooner or later.

Until then, though..

Get any laptop and clean the shit out of it, mod the BIOS if you want to. I'm still on Elitebooks (8770w), they're tanks, and Intel hasn't made noticeable improvement in CPU performance since Ivy Bridge.

Zbooks seem to continue the tradition. Dell's Precisions are great, too.

Haven't had experience with the newer Thinkpads, the design, materials and being owned by a Chinese megacorp kind of drove me away.

HP's "keylogger" doesn't belong in this discussion. It was a debug trace to a driver. I've left similar traces as part of debugging. It wasn't even their driver but belonged to Synaptics.

As recently as 2016, Windows Thinkpads were documented to be sending daily usage data to Lenovo. The app is easily disabled, but users may not be aware of the telemetry. You agreed to this in the EULA.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13300357

If you're tech saavy it's a bit less important. Scamming average consumers is sad, but ThinkPads to me are IBM, not Lenovo, so they have different boxes in my mind. The hardware is good, linux runs nice on it. Case closed.

You should take into consideration that for both IdeaPad (the superfish one) and ThinkPad Lenovo is not much more than brand. These two lines are designed and manufactured by completely separate corporations. What is somewhat funny in this regard is that the real maker of modern ThinkPads (probably at least since introduction of the letter-number nomenclature) is Acer/Wistron with Acer as a brand being mostly known for having sub-par quality. IdeaPads are AFAIK mostly made by Compal.

I was completely unaware that Acer made ThinkPads, and that blows my mind. A quick google was not able to confirm that, which is not unexpected since that sort of rebranding is usually hushed. Do you have a source? Not saying you need one, but wondering if you already have one. Would be interested to read more. I've had a really bad opinion of Acers since buying one a decade ago, and currently have a high opinion of Thinkpads (and am typing on a 2018 model right now).

I found it, but it's really obscure. Check this out:

1) You can find a couple of threads where people either say Wistron makes Lenovo Thinkpads, and even one where someone finds the Wistron name on a X1 Carbon box they were shipped: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/x1-carbon-shipping-t...

2) Wistron is a spinoff of Acer. Specifically the Manufacturing/R&D wing of Acer. However, that spinoff happened in 2000, so there really isn't a connection between Acer and Wistron anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wistron

This is a nice 2009 article about Wistron: https://www.forbes.com/global/2009/1214/technology-wistron-s...

Nice work! Thanks!

I don't know if Acer manufactures Thinkpads but Wistron is not Acer.

Good for you. There was no spyware in the slightest on my X1.

You checked the Windows Platform Binary Table in the BIOS/UEFI? That was how they delivered their crapware before. Even a clean install with your own media would inject a Lenovo exe into Windows directly from the BIOS with no way to disable it. Scary stuff.

Yup. Luckily i've got a friend who knows BIOS stuff like I could never do (Hi Greg) - nothing in there. Besides, it gets Fedora 28 installed and Windows is only used for doing firmware updates.

Which tbf Lenovo cocked up a couple of weeks ago and hosed the SSD firmware so it didn't boot. Luckily i'm not a moron so everything was backed up, they sent a new SSD and they picked up the old one to recover, which I assume will be a hardware firmware flash. I don't need the backup, but I am looking forward to Lenovo spending the money for the pickup/flash/delivery to make sure it costs them as much money as possible so they don't do this again.

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/943m9o/x1c6_ssd_f...

I think you either missed or ignored the point the parent comment made regarding their reasons for avoiding Lenovo as a company, rather than strictly wishing to avoid spyware in one's own laptop.

I didn't miss it. Don't have any care or skin in the game when it comes to Lenovo, but their Thinkpads have never had this crap in there. When they do, i'm out. HP have crap in their installs, so do Dell. Hell, even Microsoft put Candy Crush in there and telemetry I can't uninstall.

That you know about.

Good for you. Same goes for every box you use that you don't personally inspect the firmware source code for the NIC, ME, graphics card, USB, Thunderbolt controller, etc. Personally i'll stand on the shoulder of giants (people who do actually inspect this, I don't have the skills) and monitor the shit out of my network instead of worrying about it, because I can actually do that bit.

I don’t use windows. There could be one for Linux but I can’t spent my life worrying about what could be. Gotta get work done eventually and I’ve got encrypted boot and data volume with secureboot.

If you have a larger tinfoil hat you can always libreboot an x220.

installed spyware on their hardware?

Can you explain more?

In 2015, Lenovo (who currently owns the Thinkpad brand) got caught installing adware and certificates into the Windows root certificate store. This is known as Superfish:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish

What about Apple retaining deleted browsing history in iCloud?[0]

0) https://www.macrumors.com/2017/02/09/icloud-storing-deleted-...

It's the difference between recommending the consumer line and business line, they are not related technically. Lenovo's consumer line is Ideapad, their business line is Thinkpad. If they tried something similar on a business line, they would go bankrupt because they would never get another contract again. It would fall under Industrial Espionage which is illegal. That's why governments and large corporations still buy Thinkpad.

You sound awfully confident. This sort of distinction, where you declare something about the world to be certain as a consequence of a certain arbitrary categorization, I have an urge to call "nominative determinism" (although the phrase is generally used differently)

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