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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?
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
I wonder if it's compatible with the rootkit that Sony so kindly installed for me?
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.
They were already on their way out the moment they were purchased by a foreign company with some degree of state control.
(Yeah, even the "domestic" companies foreign-source most of their parts but at least the system design is domestically controlled.)
I work for a defense contractor, the moment the Lenovo buyout happened we stopped buying Thinkpads and went to Dell. It was pretty much mandated by the customer. (If I recall correctly, there were a lot of news articles about the government banning further Thinkpad purchases post-Lenovo across the board around that time.)
Now, Lenovo has effectively done just what the US government feared they might do - try to sneak stuff onto customers' machines for their own gain.
Who knows what else in addition to this adware is getting slipped to customers?