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Comment by mogadsheu | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a small fine, compared to the potential financial benefit of that installation. Hopefully it serves as a deterrent for future adware installs. If not, maybe we start calling our lawmakers.

For those of you in the adware space, would you pay >$10 per head to install your adware onto a computer? My guess is absolutely.

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Amazon gives you a $20 discount to take ads on Kindle purchases. The possibility of having to pay $10 only if caught and fined seems like not at all a deterrent.

Amazon ads are usually for things Amazon sells... Windows sorta advertises too... Products Microsoft sells too

I don't agree with it but cross promotion of products a company sells is at least a little more reasonable.

Agreed it’s tiny.. hopefully this fine implies that future infractions may carry much more serious penalties

This fine implies to me that future infractions will not be taken seriously, just as this one wasn't.

The article mentions another $7M worth of fines, and that's just for the US.

Also, they sold their customers pretty cheap, so the combined fines likely significantly exceed the profit from the deal: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/02/27/lenov...

While I do think the punishment should be significantly more severe (including jail time for executives), I suspect the scandal has made companies aware that this is a bad idea.

I still don't get why it didn't hurt them more in the enterprise space (read: why large companies didn't institute a strict "no lenovo" policy for a couple years). That would have been way more effective than fines.

> I still don't get why it didn't hurt them more in the enterprise space (read: why large companies didn't institute a strict "no lenovo" policy for a couple years). That would have been way more effective than fines.

Using vendor OS images is a rookie mistake in the first place.

Wasn't their shitty bios rewriting parts of windows? Vanilla OS images won't save you there.

Yes, Windows has a feature called Microsoft Windows Platform Binary Table that allows the OEM to embed any executable file they want into the UEFI image which is then automatically run on every boot. Extremely terrifying backdoor mechanism.

Not half as scary as Apple's DEP program. Pretty much everyone is moving this way because it's super convenient for admins -- devices arrive out of the box working and configured. Google has "Zero Touch", Samsung as their Knox program.

Apple seems interested in keeping things fairly secure, is this a theoretical fear or an exploit I've never heard of?

I don’t understand about your point about Apple DEP. could you clarify? It’s predominantly used on company-owned laptops and requires an Apple company account or developer license to work. I haven’t seen it used for consumer computers.

> I suspect the scandal has made companies aware that this is a bad idea.

I kind of wonder how many people were like, "pre-install adware on PCs? Why didn't I think of that?!?"

Hasn't this kind of thing been going on for years though?

Preinstalled crapware for Windows based PCs has been the norm since I can remember - along with physical crapware stickers.

When I buy PCs, I only buy either the business line from Dell or from the MS store.

Big companies usually already have their enterprise customized image of the OS, when they buy hardware, they are interested only in the hardware.

And the Windows Platform Binary Table let Lenovo put it back on the drive via UEFI at boot. [0]

[0] https://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=2013

Small? It's negligible, and acts like the opposite of a deterrent: it's an implicit authorization.

I read the headline thinking it was a purchasing deal, not a fine...

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