Lenovo's Promise for a Cleaner, Safer PC | Hacker News Reader

Lenovo's Promise for a Cleaner, Safer PC

news.lenovo.com

47 pointsJoshTriplett45 comments

"software required to make hardware work well (for example, when we include unique hardware in our devices, like a 3D camera), security software and Lenovo applications. This should eliminate what our industry calls “adware” and “bloatware.”"

Which sounds awfully like bloatware. Maybe that's a bit snide; they are at least addressing the problem and committing not to install stuff which is really bad.

In practice whenever I hook up a scanner or a printer those apps typically are bloatware. Hopefully they are installing the minimal functionality to get this stuff working.

Precisely. If they're really committed to selling people clean computers, they should only include OS and device drivers.

Sadly many people see the anti-malware boatware as useful. Perhaps this could be a seperate disc, so the machine comes with a clean OS and you can chose to install the extras.

I would love for any manufacturer to offer a "Just Windows" version. On my last Windows desktop, I freshly installed Windows 7 when it came out and it was a much better experience than the brand new Windows 7 laptop I had purchased, but with the additional manufacturer bloat. Immediately re-installed a fresh version of Windows and the performance and experience drastically improved.

Windows PCs sold through Microsoft Stores are imaged with a clean version of Windows with no ad-ons. Often, the MS store prices are competitive with other channels.

Windows itself phones home, so the difference is arguable.

The HP business class desktops are pretty clean. Although for some reason they include HP Games sometimes which I never understood. The laptops on the other hand have a ton of shit.

Why doesn't Microsoft do something about this? It can't help the Windows reputation that most of the problems Windows users have are not caused by Windows, but by the crapware-suite that came with their PC.

They do on a limited basis. They sell "Signature Edition" computers without the bloatware/spyware installed.

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store?SiteID=msusa&Locale=en_U...

One of the downsides of being a convicted monopolist. They abused their power to exert pressure on vendors to bundle or not bundle certain applications, so now they're not allowed to do it at all.

About "Lenovo applications," the first thing I think of is the apps for things like running diagnostics, installing new firmware and notifying users of updates from the manufacturer. These are a Thinkpad tradition going back many years. I think we should grant that these are reasonable and normal things for Lenovo to preinstall.

On the other hand, (and I'm not sure whether Lenovo does this nowadays) almost every PC manufacturer typically ships Windows systems pre-installed with third-party crap like Norton Antivirus under the rubric of "security software," which really are crapware; these tend to harass clueless users with scary ads and solicit expensive subscriptions, they're hard to remove, they leave crap lying around after uninstallation. That's all indefensible when Microsoft itself is providing good free-of-charge alternatives like Windows Defender.

It makes plenty of sense to complain about Superfish and on that basis to use Lenovo as an example to discourage the other manufacturers, but let's not pretend that there is no crapware on most other mainstream laptops (Dell, etc.) That is an industry problem.

So they give you bloatware (McAfee) to apologize for giving you bloatware.

If you ask any purveyor of crapware what they peddle, you'd never get them to admit to it being crapwware. Take YC for instance, with their InstallMonetizer investment that PG tried to defend as not-crapware[1]. This is a way for Lenovo to commit to something without committing to anything. They'll be right back to installing gigabytes of crapware on their laptop lines just as soon as they have some marketing people type up reasons why it's an enhancement.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711

Exactly. While this Lenovo statement is still a good thing, and IMO shows that they are at least trying to address a real problem, you have to note that they haven't specifically mentioned any software that they are going to remove.

In other words, they probably think that all the software they preload is useful.

They're not to be trusted. PC's are a commodity space. The marginally better quality of a Lenovo isn't worth the tremendous security risk.

It is a good reaction, so they get some props for that I guess. I mean they had to remove Superfish, but going beyond that and committing to removing all "bloatware" is at least a good declaration of intent.

How can you trust this response when Lenovo still maintains that Superfish was not a security problem except in the wild imaginations of security researchers? You can't.

Executives far, far removed from the decision to preload Superfish are unlikely to actually understand the problem. And that's OK. Their job isn't to understand how these things work, it's to set policies for folks who do. As a result, they've articulated a specific, falsifiable claim about the preload policy for their upcoming laptops.

Our job is to hold them to their word. If they keep it, the industry ends up in a much better place.

Really? According to this they have classified it as a "Man-in-the-Middle Attack"

http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish

Are they elsewhere also still saying otherwise?

"We will significantly reduce preloaded applications." As a primary Mac and Linux user, it is absolutely incredible to me that any PC that isn't given to customers for free would have more than zero preloaded so-called applications by default. I accept that my television, or Google, or Facebook dumps advertising on me, because otherwise how would they monetize? But since when did it become okay to load multi-hundred- or thousand-dollar devices, for which customers have paid dearly, with advertising and bloatware that benefits only the manufacturer? Are you guys paying for this crap?

Lower-end PCs typically have something like 5% margin, compared to substantially more on a mac. And that's assuming you configured the hardware in a way that someone wanted to buy it before it became semi-obsolete on the store shelf and has to be sold for even less.

The manufacturers have to make up the money somewhere. With a complex product at commodity rates, with customers mostly having no idea what the differences are between them (and for good reason, it's all just a set of nasty price/perf/quality tradeoffs that I wouldn't want to look at), you compete on very basic features and the price that they dominate.

That might well be true for many PCs, but the ThinkPad range is pretty high end and comparable to Macs in both specs and price. As far as I can tell, it's not just the low-end crap that's affected by this issue?

ThinkPads didn't have the software installed. Only the lower-end stuff.

They didn't have Superfish installed, but they do come with bloatware.

Yea I agree with you on the pre-loaded applications, but how is it different from a Samsung TV coming pre-loaded with their applications? I'm not sure why you assume the TV is ok but the computer isn't. Both are pretty expensive appliances.

I don't mean the TV itself. I mean TV programming.

It's hardly the only area where a paid-for experience includes obviously unwanted advertising.

Further, I don't see that consumers have much choice if they don't want to reinstall a fresh OS -- every major brand of PC I know of includes similar bloat. Also remember laptops don't come with a nice fresh Windows CD you can install from -- they come with a branded recovery disc (or partition) which "recovers" it to factory condition.

>It's hardly the only area where a paid-for experience includes obviously unwanted advertising.

True, but we shouldn't pretend that this isn't a product of very recent history. When cable television channels started running ads, and when movie theaters began running commercials before the feature, it was really shocking to people. Most were enraged at the time.

The Overton Window has changed us.

I'm a Linux user paying for good hardware. I don't use Windows, so I don't have to deal with its issues. It wouldn't help me at all to buy hardware that doesn't support my uses, so I'll continue to buy what works best for me.

This is a positive step. For now, you can try the Microsoft signature editions of various pcs. Or a Mac.

>> Additionally, we will offer Lenovo PC users affected by this issue a free 6-month subscription to McAfee LiveSafe service

This is definitely the most ironic part.

I agree. The first thing I do to a new machine is get rid of McAfee/Norton, leave it to Lenovo to find profit in the midst of what should be a PR disaster!

I can't help but take this with a pinch of salt. I own a Thinkpad x220t, which is an amazing little machine (except maybe for the wonky wifi) but I completely fail to see how most of the Lenovo software is "required".

Take for instance the wifi manager, which crams a huge icon in the corner of your screen and somehow makes connecting to wifi even slower than it already is (not even speaking to the atrocious interface). I regularly disable the thing, yet Lenovo's updates insist on re-enabling it, without my consent. And this isn't the only Lenovo "required" software to have this behavior. There's also the system health thing, which will seemingly randomly pop up when I'm watching a film or playing a game.

I'm really curious, how does Lenovo think this improves user experience?

We buy these for work. We use our own Windows images because the stock image is just a nightmare of OEM crap. Its just shocking how much they put there. Before we used images we would just push them out as-is and it would cause all sorts of weird and hard to solve issues. One day no one could search their Outlook. Turns out that there's a Lenovo 'speed boost' service installed by default. It literally just sits there and then disables the Windows Search Service arbitrarily. Without that service, you can't search for files, emails, etc. How that made it to production equipment is mind-blowing. Took a while to figure out. We would re-index and restart the services, etc but it came back. There's a lone Lenovo support thread on their website about this where the customer answers his own question. Even Lenovo support doesn't know about this junk.

Sadly, the stock Windows experience is pretty pleasant, its just most people will never experience it. I'm not sure who is clamoring for a 3rd party "wireless manager" or "update helper" or "speed boosters." Probably no one but product managers at Lenovo know that without this ecosystem of add-on crapware, their jobs would probably be eliminated.

The above is just the "business productivity" apps. On their consumer models, they're chocked not only with a lot of these apps but also tons of 3rd party pre-loads like multiple ebook readers, Norton AV, Evernote, etc. No wonder so many people just buy OSX machines. You get just as good, if not better hardware, and a machine that's usable right out of the box. With PCs, it seems like these 3rd party companies are the real customer and we're the product. That's okay with free stuff, but if I'm spending $1,000 or more, I expect to be treated a lot better.

Perhaps they should start by admitting that their prior response to that debacle was dishonest (or at least "horrifyingly, inexcusably incorrect", if they'd rather plead incompetence).

Gotta love the passive run-on sentence they start the article with:

> Just over a week ago, the Superfish visual discovery software preloaded onto Lenovo consumer notebooks beginning in September 2014 created concern and frustration among our customers and the security and privacy communities.

Instead of:

"Sorry, we messed up!"

I assume they're avoiding admitting fault or damage to make it less easy for them to get sued?

They have already apologized several times, and the wording you quoted directly parallels one of the previous apologies.

"For some countries, certain applications customarily expected by users will also be included."

Does anyone know what this vague clause means? I, for one, have sadly come to "expect" all sorts of preinstalled crap on my laptops.

I assumed this meant asian-language input software?

The fact that not a single Lenovo employee ever leaked what Lenovo was doing prior to discovery makes this statement moot for me.

This is a great move on their part, but would have been much better if preceded or accompanied by an apology.

A good reaction. I will be quite happy if they hold themselves to this promise as bloatware is quite a problem. If anything they should include Malwarebytes which gives a free unlimited scanner, but not realtime protection unless you register. Compared to other antiviruses that just turn off it is a better pre-install option. But naturally this is a partnership and pricing issue.

I don't trust anyone who uses multiple spaces after a period.

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