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Are Toshiba Notebooks 'Phoning Home'?

Posted by timothy on from the just-saying-hi-to-the-folks dept.

Tangential notes puzzledly: "At our company (software consulting) we equip our consultants with Toshiba notebooks. I received this message today from one of our consultants who was just upgraded to a new Satellite Pro 4300 ... 'My new Toshiba laptop appears to call home. While working on something else I opened port 1214 on my firewall and started monitoring it with a packet sniffer. To my amazement, I see my laptop communicating with a Toshiba server on that port. Are you guys aware of this?'... Has anybody else seen this behavior? Is this some new 'support' feature? Does anybody care?" Curious Toshiba notebooks owners, speak up!

20 comments

  1. Re:Gimme a break by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Ummm, www.computrace.com looks pretty legit, and offers software that matches his claims. Do you actually do any research before spouting off nonsense?

  2. Might be something else entirely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    The company I work for uses a program called computrace on our Dell Machines. This is an asset tracking and theft recovery tool. It loads from the MBR at boot time into memeoery and calls home on a schedule to report its where abouts. So if the machine is stolen, or otherwise not where it oughta be(lots of departments seem to raid other departments for equipment around here) it can be recovered. Our users don't know its there, infact I think only about 12 of us total know its there.

  3. Not just toshiba: here's how to tell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2
    I bought a satellite and it took three tries to kill off *most* of this behaviour. I had to recover from the rescue CD several times, but here's what I found... and it was ugly.

    I'd seen this kind of stuff before with netscape and that talkbalk client they used, but simply renaming the filename.exe to nofilename.exe usually did the trick. Works great with find fast, btw.

    However, for a good time, look through the registry. Toshiba stuffs so many URLS into this system that I felt like my laptop was a giant banner ad.

    The registry has a nice search function - and while I was surprised at the amount of stuff I found, it made me wonder how much more is hidden elsewhere in the system.

    Simply use the registry search function to search for "www" or ".com" or "http:" or "https:" - you'll see things that'll make you tremble. Real Player is the worst, followed by Microsoft. ALL software today phones home, so remember to install adobe.com and microsoft.com in your hosts file and alias them to 127.0.0.1 as well.

    I simply replaced most of the addresses I found with either 127.0.0.1/whatever. It certainly prevents my laptop from chattering away when I don't expect it. I don't look forward to XP.

    1. Re:Not just toshiba: here's how to tell by daddy'o · · Score: 1

      I tried using find key in Regedt32, I can't seem to find anything with 'www' or 'http:' Exactly what trees did you search under and how did you perform the search... I have Real player, adobe, etc... installed as well..

    2. Re:Not just toshiba: here's how to tell by daddy'o · · Score: 1

      Ahh, right... Nice, I took a gander, did not catch anything for adobe, but Real is loaded with links... It even caches the last few urls I viewed with the player, probably for usage data... I noticed one of my macromedia has a key in there to notify a certain server of any possible install errors... I did not notice anything overtly invasive, but I may not have looked hard enough...

  4. Dunno if this has anything to do with it but... by True+Dork · · Score: 4

    port 1214 is also the port used by KaZaA and MusicCity's Morpheus for the direct semi-gnutella style communication for the file sharing network. Are you running either? Is it possible that it was a coincidence that you were on this system as well as someone from Toshiba?

  5. Re:Wipe the hard drive... by Graymalkin · · Score: 1

    "Laptops without an OS are much cheaper than with an OS"

    Uh...not to mention they are refurbished as you state. OEM versions of Windows cost about 20$ each if not less.

    --
    I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  6. Ahh! That's the laptop I'm running! by babbage · · Score: 1

    Do you have any idea what program is is that's running this? I'm running a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300 that came with WinNT and a handful of apps that Toshiba provided (monitoring the battery, the pc-port, etc). I'm very curious what application is doing the communicating here. What other info do you have? Let me know in more detail -- by email if you'd like -- and I'd be glad to help figure out if it's just your laptop or if others in the same product line (i.e. my computer) are doing the same thing. Grab a list of running processes, services, etc. so we can look for anything suspicious...

    --
    DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
  7. Re:Wipe the hard drive... by charstar · · Score: 1
    Where do you get the hardware-specific drivers?

    Linux runs awesome on my Tecra 8100. First thing I did when IT gave me the thing was to wipe the drive and load linux. takes about 5 hours of minimal redhat install and configure->make->make install for all the latest software. drivers aren't an issue, they are all in the kernel and XFree86 has the Savage/MX driver built in.

  8. Re:Wipe the hard drive... by manly · · Score: 1

    So long as all the drivers are actually downloadable, then this is an acceptable (albeit not entirely convenient) procedure. This way, you'll achieve more of a minimal install, sans any of the extra unnecessary programs OEMs usually install for you (and often which you can't uninstall). Many businesses don't mind as they standardize on a particular model, and could clone a "perfect" installation onto multiple machines.

    The only serious drawback is that some useful apps that come preinstalled are not generally downloadable, i.e. software DVD players.

    Oh and btw, for many laptops these days, it's a smooth procedure to install a recent Linux distro, i.e. Red Hat 7.1 or SuSE 7.2, and of course you don't have to download umpteen drivers. Your machine's hardware just needs to be supported by the kernel, and you're in good shape. Funny how Linux actually wins in usability in certain cases, huh?

  9. Re:Gimme a break by Phork · · Score: 1

    umm, this is a very real product, i saw their booth at RSAcon this year.

    --
    -- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
  10. Is it "VirtualTech"? by Lish · · Score: 4
    Perhaps it has something to do with this? The 4300 is listed as one of the models it's installed on. Might be a starting place to look, anyway. Here is a "white paper" on it.


    ---

    --
    "This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
  11. I haven't noticed anything... by Jordan+Block · · Score: 1

    I've had a satellite for about 6 months now and have never noticed anything like that in my firewall logs, then again I ditched the windows install on it long ago.

    It may be toshiba's tech support thingy, not sure what its called.

  12. Wipe the hard drive... by Ssolstice · · Score: 1

    As soon as a new system shows up here at work, I immediately wipe the hard drive and do a clean installation. That way I know exactly what's running, and prevents any annoying software the manufacturer deems necessary to install. That should fix your problem, unless this is being run from the BIOS...

    1. Re:Wipe the hard drive... by corky6921 · · Score: 1

      In addition to OEM-specific drivers, some Toshibas won't let you wipe with anything but a Toshiba reinstall CD. My Toshiba Portege 3480CT won't load the CDROM drivers in Win2000 setup unless you install from the Toshiba CD. I was leery of doing this at first, but it seemed to work out fine in the end -- after all, Windows 2000 works well, and there were minimal manufacturer-installed programs (mostly just shortcuts in the Start Menu to setup programs located on the CD.)

      I tend to do the wipe-first-then-install on desktops, but with laptops there is so much that could go wrong. I wiped my boss's Fujitsu laptop (which came with Win98) and we put Win2000 on it -- there is still an "unknown device" in the Control Panel, even after we downloaded all requisite drivers from Fujitsu. Everything seems to work fine, but as always, be careful and YMMV, especially with proprietary hardware such as Compaq Deskpros and laptops.

    2. Re:Wipe the hard drive... by Rick+the+Red · · Score: 1
      Oh and btw, for many laptops these days, it's a smooth procedure to install a recent Linux distro, i.e. Red Hat 7.1 or SuSE 7.2, and of course you don't have to download umpteen drivers.

      Yeah, I know. What I didn't say was that I loaded WinME and all the IBM patches on my wife's IBM 600; my IBM 600 has Red Hat 6.x (don't remember which; I don't much care because I'm going to upgrade to the 2.4 kernel once I pick a distro, and it's probably not going to be Red Hat 7.x). You're right, it was much easier to load Linux. Of course, I chose the IBM because of their Linux support :-)

      BTW and OT, we bought them on eBay from a company that refurbishes them and sells them without an OS. Laptops without an OS are much cheaper than with an OS, since the OS in question is undoubtedly Windows.

      --
      If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
    3. Re:Wipe the hard drive... by Rick+the+Red · · Score: 1
      Must be nice to work for such a company. My company issue Dell laptop has the little sticker that says it's made for Win2000, but we're not allowed to run anything other than Win98. Yeah, I'd rather run Linux, but at least Win2000 is stable; Win98 crashes so often we've stopped complaining about it and now look at the lockup/reboot cycles as bonus 15 minute breaks courtesy of the IT department.

      --
      If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
    4. Re:Wipe the hard drive... by Rick+the+Red · · Score: 3
      As soon as a new system shows up here at work, I immediately wipe the hard drive and do a clean installation.

      Even the laptops? That's what this is, a laptop. Where do you get the hardware-specific drivers? I loaded WinME on a wiped-clean IBM 600 laptop and it loaded just fine, but it didn't really work right until I downloaded all the IBM patches and BIOS upgrades, essentially turning my over-the-counter copy of WinME into an IBM-Specific OEM copy of WinME. If Toshiba laptops run with over-the-counter Windows, that's a neat trick. Usually no two laptops from any given manufacturer share the same drivers, let alone use the generic drivers provided by Microsoft (if they share the same drivers they ususally have the same model number; IBM has dozens of "Model 600" laptops because each one requires a different driver mix).

      --
      If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
    5. Re:Wipe the hard drive... by Sean+Clifford · · Score: 1
      Even the notebooks in my shop. Every box that comes in (new or recycled) gets blasted clean. Drivers and BIOS updates are downloaded and installed, as is the full install of Office Premium (or Star Office, or whatever), along with a host of other apps, utilites, patches, service packs and such. Unnecessary software is removed and special requests are added. The box is configured for the recipient, email and personal settings are migrated, it's assigned an IP bound to the MAC address of the card, burned-in, then goes to the recipient. This generally takes 48-72 hours from the time the boxes arrive, depending on work load (but 24 hours is burn-in time).

      ImageCast saves the day with setting up and maintaining labs, faculty boxes, and notebooks. You can send out patches or remotely install software, bleem boxes, etc. across your network. It's sweet and it's SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) in my shop. Installing and configuring stuff yourself is the only way to ensure that boxes are up to snuff when issued. Of course, nothing prevents the user from installing stuff later on.

      But if you block all ports but 80 (web server) - OUTGOING and INCOMING - plus other stuff you need or want to run (ftp, databases, ICQ, SETI@home, etc.) at the router then you don't have to worry much about unauthorized apps talking dirty with Microsoft or Toshiba on your nickle.

  13. Re:Gimme a break by NNKK · · Score: 1

    they did it by asking microsoft for permission to add the utility to the install CD
    *sigh*