IssueRaiser

There's crapware, and then there's spyware/adware.

There's crapware, and then there's spyware/adware. The shovelware that most vendors ship on their boxes is offensive, yes. It's annoying. It steals a little of my life each time I buy a new machine, because I have to take time to re-image the system or clean off the crap (my current HP Envy was particularly egregious in this waste of my time, in that the restore image didn't work, so I had to wait ten days to get a restore DVD from them, and had to pay them $15 for the privilege of being able to restore my system). But, none of this is comparable to installing spyware on your customers systems. They keep making claims that it isn't spyware, but in a previous HN thread, someone was trivially able to find the tracking and re-targeting codes in the injected code. It is the definition of spyware, and even worse, it is broken in such a way that it enabled MITM attacks. "It might now be the case going forward that Lenovo will be a better choice. They've been burned." Have you read their statements about it? Every single one of them denies any wrongdoing. They believe it's just a "customers don't like this software" issue. They don't believe it is a "We have likely committed crimes against our customers", which is what it actually is, at least in jurisdictions that take citizen privacy at all seriously. (In the US the TOS click through probably protects them, because the US doesn't give a shit about privacy, but in some other countries it probably wouldn't.)

Posted by SwellJoe on Feb 19, 2015, 10:42 PM

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reliability (SaaS)

There's crapware, and then there's spyware/adware.

SwellJoeFeb 19, 2015, 10:42 PM

There's crapware, and then there's spyware/adware. The shovelware that most vendors ship on their boxes is offensive, yes. It's annoying. It steals a little of my life each time I buy a new machine, because I have to take time to re-image the system or clean off the crap (my current HP Envy was particularly egregious in this waste of my time, in that the restore image didn't work, so I had to wait ten days to get a restore DVD from them, and had to pay them $15 for the privilege of being able to restore my system). But, none of this is comparable to installing spyware on your customers systems. They keep making claims that it isn't spyware, but in a previous HN thread, someone was trivially able to find the tracking and re-targeting codes in the injected code. It is the definition of spyware, and even worse, it is broken in such a way that it enabled MITM attacks. "It might now be the case going forward that Lenovo will be a better choice. They've been burned." Have you read their statements about it? Every single one of them denies any wrongdoing. They believe it's just a "customers don't like this software" issue. They don't believe it is a "We have likely committed crimes against our customers", which is what it actually is, at least in jurisdictions that take citizen privacy at all seriously. (In the US the TOS click through probably protects them, because the US doesn't give a shit about privacy, but in some other countries it probably wouldn't.)

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