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Lenovo Software Update Stealthily Installs Adware
An anonymous reader writes "A recent Lenovo automatic software update has the great feature of displaying annoying pop-up ads for Lenovo products. What's worse, it appears that many users are unable to turn the advertisement 'feature' off, subjecting them to pop-ups every couple of hours. Gee guys, a note about your 20% off sale in my e-mail wouldn't have bothered me that much, but you really had to pop up over top of my PowerPoint slides? I'm sure that all of my office colleagues will be running to order ThinkPads ..."
It hid some guy's PowerPoint presentation? I'd consider that a feature not a bug.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Annoying ad pop-up or Death by PowerPoint? Nope. Can't decide.
I ran into this problem the other day. It ask you if you do not want to show the ads anymore, but it doesn't accept your answer and shows them over and over. I finally figured out what app was causing it and disabled it in msconfig. I can't remember what it was right now, but when I get home I will reply to this with the name of the app to disable.
btw, I got the adware when I installed the Thinkpad Wireless software.
This is the reason that I build my own computers whenever possible - the manufacturers install crap upon crap on your box. This is just taking it to the next level.
I wonder what it would cost to build computers without the annoying shit installed. Is that all that's making them profitable?
I have an S10 ideapad - and yeah the "don't show this ad again" checkbox doesn't work. Whats worse is this app has never actually worked for the S10.
Probably last Lenovo laptop I buy (and I've had several all the way back when they were badged IBM machines).
The last thing Lenovo wanted to happen is to dilute the Thinkpad brand and screw up a good thing, when they purchased thinkpad from IBM. Knowing this, I bought a Thinkpad, and the thing totally blows, their customer service is bad and they install way too much crapware on the PC by default (even more than the average manufacturer). Way to go guys...
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
From reading the discussion forums, there are two problems:
1) System is not obeying checkbox to not show specific message again.
2) System is presenting ads through software installed by the vendor, not by email or browser.
At first #1 seems to be the bigger problem, as if you could check a box not to see the message again you'll only be bothered once... until you read the bit about "specific" again. Checking that box by design is supposed to only block that EXACT ad, not others that may come later...
That was indeed an insane choice to include by a vendor. As noted, these could pop up at the most inconvenient time. Even if you dismiss one and it worked, you never know when you may get another.
I'm sure they'll get rid of this soon, but it has to go down in history as one of the bigger WTF moments in vendor specific software installs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This issue only affects Windows users.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Thats it folks, thinkpads are officially dethroned as the king of business laptops.
Good-bye
I wonder if it's compatible with the rootkit that Sony so kindly installed for me?
Just think how wonderful it will be once the red chinese government puts their own stealthy spyware right into the microcode!
Are you having paranoid thought now?
Kind of like vampires, doesn't matter what the holy symbol is as long as it does the job. I personally prefer my ubuntu CD but what ever banishes the evil is good enough.
You do realize that this is just another salvo in the Chinese effort to cripple American business productivity and efficiency, don't you? What little there is left of it, that is?
Another example of Chinese self-destruction.
I was considering buying a ThinkPad for my next laptop purchase. Not that I was going to keep Windows on it anyway, but I won't buy one on principle now.
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
They need to do way instain adware>
who annoy thier user. becuse these user cant fright back?
it was on slasdot this mroing a user in ofice who had kill her three popups. they are taking the laptop back to the shop too get repalcement my pary are with the colleges who didnt see the persentration; i am truley sorry for your lots.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
What idiot in marketing (marketing majors have no souls) convinced an even bigger idiot in management that this would be a good idea?
People LOVE popups, right, everyone knows this, right?
A stunt like this isn't going to increase sales, it's going to DECREASE them. And, this is yet another example why I DO NOT run any sort of automatic update. I update software/drivers, etc, when I feel a NEED to do so, if it's working, leave it alone. Updates only usually end up in adding more bloat to a system anyway, look at how Acrobat reader is 10 times the size it was a couple years ago yet doesn't do anything significantly different.
Corporatism != Free Market
Wow, that's an incredibly stupid thing for Lenovo to do. I was about to order a Lenovo for my next laptop and if it worked out I was going to ask our IT department to change from the current incumbents (Dell and Sony) to Lenovo for our sales and executive staff. I'm going to wait to see that this issue is fully resolved before making a move, and if they don't fix it, they can forget about 20 to 30 laptop orders a year from my company. I don't think my emotion would be unique -- I'm sure 90% of IT managers would disqualify Lenovo if they knew about this spam pop-up problem and didn't have an easy way to disable it enterprise-wide. Billions of dollars are at risk for something that probably only brings them a few hundred K$ per year. Bone-headed.
Nice, I wish I had mod points.
The only thing that would make this better is if Lenovo sold ad space. Imagine explaining the pr0n popups during your next big presentation. This seems so inevitable that I'm astonished that they haven't already done it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What are you doing?! You are ruining BigBlue's legacy.
You should be the best of the best for business.
Stop adding all this extra Adware, crap software on new systems
I am ashamed to be a IBM fan right now.. Ashamed.
Is that even English?
Encyclopedia Dramatica "article" and Flash (*shudder*) animation.
I had this exact thing start happening earlier this week. I googled it and used the instructions to disable the Lenovo Message Center Plus. This is my work Laptop. I openned a ticket and tried to explain to them what it was but no they had to treat my like a newbie and scan my harddrive for malware (like I hadn't already thought of that), I know its SOP but I already told them what it was. The biggest reason for openning a Ticket was so they would know about it when somebody else here (all laptops are lenovo) gets the same thing.
Its convenient enough for me that it made Slashdot's front page so I can send this link to them.
SEE!!!
badly emulated chinglish..
At the time they were all sitting around thinking of how to renew ad ventures, this idea came up...
At the next presentation, they will be sure NOT to use a Lenovo thinkpad to present the new ads,
in case the old ads pop up over top of the the new ones! : P
The genius minds of one culture might be leagues behind the genius minds of another...
Obligatory "Doesn't happen on a Mac" comment!
How about all you HARDWARE manufacturers sell me HARDWARE and stay the fuck out of the SOFTWARE business. Unlike Windows which I've only "rented" from Microsoft, I BOUGHT your damned hardware. It's now MINE. When I update a BIOS or install a driver, what I want is a BIOS or a driver, not you shill for some lame-assed POS software. Fuck off already. Assholes.
I would not be surprised if they install spyware that way given the Chinese love for breaking into foreign networks
You misspelled your handle too, Mr. "iPhoneFreak". You really needs a clicky keyboard.
-Anymonus Coward
google how is babby formed; there's a flash that's hilarious. But the real thing is 3 links down in the yahoo answers.
Karnal
Green Dam software. :-)
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
And I thought it was bad when Sun started bundling default checked Yahoo toolbar with Java.
It's not just that the ads pop up every 2 hours, but when they pop up in the middle of an important presentation to your most critical customers that this really bites.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
As a Thinkpad owner, I can say with certainty that this is not as big of a deal as it is being made out to be. For starters, the "Message Center" is an optional, separate component that you are under no obligation to download when you do a software update. The updater walks you through the "critical" and "optional" updates, much like the Windows update does. A description of the software is provided so that you know what you are downloading.
Anyone with half a brain would choose not to install the Message Center since it is obviously there to SEND MESSAGES from Lenovo to you. The pop-ups pretty much fit in with the exact purpose of the Message Center, so Lenovo isn't exactly hiding anything!
If it comes pre-loaded, just uninstall it.
I personally deploy Lenovo hardware for clients and I do so from a custom made Windows image that I created by first formatting a computer and installing Windows from scratch, then adding necessary drivers. There is NO NEED for any of the Lenovo software.
The Lenovo brand hardware is actually pretty nice. We roll out T400 ThinkPad systems and so far they seem to be very rugged and perform quite well. You just have to get the Think(disad)Vantage shit off the system first.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Why would a business, with this theoretical professional attitude, use the stock image that came with *any* new computer? I thought it was more or less standard procedure for the admins to provide a sanitized and customized image and use that right off the bat. I mean, it isn't any sort of secret that computers get shipped with tons of garbage pre installed, why was it allowed to be used in a production environment like that?
Maybe we should print up some bumper stickers that say "Don't blame me - I run Linux!"
I purchased a T61 and haven't had any issues with Lenovo installed malware. Of course, I did order it with SLED10 pre-installed. Unfortunately that option is no longer available.
Knowledge Brings Fear
Nope, it looks like odd English to me. And you can trust me. Cos I'm English.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Kind of like vampires, doesn't matter what the holy symbol is as long as it does the job. I guess you've never seen Love at First Bite.
I just signed up as a Lenovo authorized reseller.
Nonono, what you really want to do is run a system daemon that pops up an X11 window every two hours with that message.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
lenovo is really just trying to motivate me to stop being lazy and finally uninstall all the software they pre-installed on the laptop I purchased earlier this year. ;)
In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. -T.S. Eliot
http://bodiflex.zbord.ru/index.php
Are you a Cosine or something?
Didn't ANYBODY at Lenovo stop and and say "Hey! We might piss off our users!"? I've got a Lenovo T61 and like it. But, after this posting, I told the firewall not to let anything regarding Lenovo updates out on the web. I also shut the update feature off in the ThinkVantage Productivity Center, (never found their updates worth much anyway). Thanks for a very useful posting, whoever you are.
Not all of us care how our machine actually looks.
And those who do generally buy Macs.
with my brand new Thinkpad W500, a very good machine otherwise. The bigger headache for me was fixing an ATI graphics driver that was giving me random BSODs with the message "ati2dvag.dll stuck in infinite loop". I had to manually update the driver from the ATI website following some instructions I found by googling. So far, so good.
Now I have to have to keep reading to find out if I can get rid of the adware, which I've so far seen pop up only once. Annoying.
Oh, also the keyboard is not quite as solid as it was on the T43 I upgraded from, but I think I'll get used to it.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Not all the ThinkVantage software is bad. The System Update software was great when I needed to update hardware drivers, none of this looking up exactly what I have and then logging into the manufacturer's website to download every driver update one by one. The problem is TVSU now doesn't just give you driver updates, it prompts you to install a bunch of stupid malware Lenovo is pushing so that you think if you use anything but their 300% marked up genuine lenovo batteries your computer will explode.