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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!

3 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. 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?

  2. 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.


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    "This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
  3. 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).

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    If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.