Comment by istingray
4 years ago
Thinkpad brand is legendary. The one hesitation I have is some sort of rootkit that Lenovo was installing called SilverFish (sp?). Did that come up on your radar?
4 years ago
Thinkpad brand is legendary. The one hesitation I have is some sort of rootkit that Lenovo was installing called SilverFish (sp?). Did that come up on your radar?
FWIW, I'll add this as a former Lenovo employee. Lenovo got their hands slapped pretty hard over that deal, and up through the time I was there (near the end of 2019) all of the people in and around my group took consumer privacy very seriously, and were very committed to making sure we never wound up making a mistake like that again.
Now... could upper management still make a decision to push something like that and make it happen? Yes, in principle. There are no guarantees. But based on observed behavior / communications that I saw inside of Lenovo I would not expect anything like that. Still, I can understand a measure of skepticism based on that whole debacle. It was a huge black-eye for the company.
Superfish iirc was Windows only. They broke (very loosely speaking) encryption to show you ads. But yes, theoretically a similar attack can be done on Linux too. Beating this is comparatively easy, reinstall the OS and kernel and install a clean version of some Linux distro.
Long time ago.
Running Fedora on my Thinkpad after having switched away from macOS/Mac Air's. I paid €450 and it's 2x faster with 3x better SW, compared to my €2500 air.