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HP Quietly Installs System-Slowing Spyware On Its PCs, Users Say (computerworld.com)
It hasn't been long since Lenovo settled a massive $3.5 million fine for preinstalling adware on laptops without users' consent, and it appears HP is on to the same route already. According to numerous reports gathered by news outlet Computer World, the brand is deploying a telemetry client on customer computers without asking permission. The software, called "HP Touchpoint Analytics Service", appears to replace the self-managed HP Touchpoint Manager solution. To make matter worse, the suite seems to be slowing down PCs, users say. From the report: Dubbed "HP Touchpoint Analytics Service," HP says it "harvests telemetry information that is used by HP Touchpoint's analytical services." Apparently, it's HP Touchpoint Analytics Client version 4.0.2.1435. There are dozens of reports of this new, ahem, service scattered all over the internet. According to Gunter Born, reports of the infection go all the way back to Nov. 15, when poster MML on BleepingComputer said: "After the latest batch of Windows updates, about a half hour after installing the last, I noticed that this had been installed on my computer because it showed up in the notes of my Kaspersky, and that it opened the Windows Dump File verifier and ran a disk check and battery test." According to Gartner, HP was the largest PC vendor in the quarter that ended in September this year.
Using Russian spyware to catch American spyware...ffs
It doesn't matter if its spying or not most 'value added' crap, computer manufacturers installs slows the computer. Rarely do they add to the performance of the PC. Hp printer installers are the worst for installing garbage you don't need.
I don't see how this is news. If you find a great deal or otherwise find yourself in the possession of a pre-built PC then the first thing you do is wipe the whole system and install fresh (could be Linux, Windows, dual-whatever-boot, or even OSX).
This has been normal since at least 20+ years ago. Did you not know this? Are you geeks or morons?
Dump pre-installed Windows, install it yourself from scratch. Or better yet dump Windows entirely and install whatever flavor of Linux suits you. Either way problem solved.
do i get a cookie for offering a solution?
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
News at 11.
u r stupid
Why not simply pay the real cost of hardware and software?
Computers and software are discounted by the high quality low intrusion data analytics installed that simply report non personally identifiable information that is sold to advertisers to make your PC experience better!
Windows only adds 200 to the cost of the PC.
I sure you can find the money to fund someone to make a printer driver, mouse driver, soundcard driver, video driver, usb driver, etc for just a few hundred dollars extra added to the cost of the PC.
Your $499 PC now costs only double or so, still less than a smartphone!
Time to pay up for software.
I have way too much end user computing experience...vendor's junkware is very familiar to me. One of the things I do a lot when building a master disk image for a company is try to determine which pieces of junkware really are needed to control built-in hardware. HP laptops are a really good example...the backlights, screen brightness, volume, etc. are controlled by a massive pig of a WPF application that needs to be installed or the devices won't work 100%. On a new install, you can actually push one of the control keys and watch for 30 or more seconds while the .NET modules are compiled in the background before the OSD appears and shows your change.
You can bet next month's house payment that these various pieces of vendor junkware consist of stitched-together example code from the hardware vendors and the lowest-bidder offshored developers contributing the glue portions. They don't invest anything beyond what they have to to get the hardware shipped. So, the speed factor is probably just a side effect of the telemetry client being the cheapest possible development HP could do. This sounds like Lenovo's Superfish moment all over again though; you'd think vendors would avoid that even on their cheapest crappiest Best Buy consumer models.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt68...
yes, no one is two words. use none if you must.
with a Macbook because it kept crashing. She's in college and too far away for me to really troubleshoot it. So she comes home and brings the Toshiba with her so I can troublshoot.
The crashes were caused by all the crapware. Reams and reams of it. This isn't a cheap laptop either, it's a $1200 i7 with 16 gigs of ram and a 7200 rpm drive (albeit no SSD).
I always wondered why the heck folks were banging on about when they said Macs were better/faster/more stable than a PC. But I only use a corporate laptop and I build desktops at home. The few old laptops I have around home run Linux. Do these manufactures not realize just how much damage the crapware does to their brand?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Not sure why HP installing Windows is characterized as "quiet"
Microsoft and HP... if you have MS Windows installed you already have a system that's spying on you and reporting back to the company. HP just wants their cut too.
Easy fix --- just wipe the drive and install a decent OS like a Linux or BSD distro (none of that systemd crap or you're just back where you started).
--
Steve (AC because I haven't bothered to register in all these years)
These fucking corporations get their asses handed to them.. Including executives who signed off on doing this shit get a nice cell at Leavenworth for a few years, along with forfeiture of ALL pay and allowances...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I have been running Linux on the desktop for 3 years... I don't miss anything. I upgraded from CentOS 6 to 7 recently and from a fresh install, it took 2 hours including my toolchain and epel apps.
On the other hand, I maintain my families Windows machines. Had to reinstall Windows 10 on a laptop this weekend because all the crapware that was slowing it down making it unusable. I swear you have to do this every few years because of crap that accumulates - let alone the crap that comes with a new PC. It took the entire day to re-install Windows and Office - many reboots for reasons I don't know -
Goodbye Sunday
Is the same garbage telemetry that HP "forgot" to disable by default a few years ago?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
HP has been a garbage hardware vendor for decades, so this should come as no surprise to anyone. When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
these days it's mostly shit, and with the whole NSA thing and what we've read, you can't be sure your computer is literally wide open. If you buy the American brands, you're vulnerable.
wow, actually that was only May of this year
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"it appears HP is on to the same route already"
They've been doing this since seriously Windows 95. Maybe not the "telemetry" thing but installing crap software the user doesn't need. I should give them some credit, I cut my IT teeth fixing these issues so with all sincerity, HP can still kiss my ass. Comcast is the only company I hate more.
On a side note, I've had great luck with my Cannon Laser printer; still on the original toner cartridge, doesn't require any special software to print, prints over wifi, and doesn't stop my print to warn me that it can't print my black and white document because it's out of magenta ink.
$3.5million is *not* a massive fine, that's less than the annual bonus to the CEO...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
"Either way problem solved."
Yes, but the problem is NOT solved. The underlying problem is that the U.S. has become an abusive society. For example, hiring Ajit Pai to stop net neutrality. He has a conflict of interest.
I used to spend most of my days passing through airports and on the road, needing to print to whatever printer was at that day's location. After installing a few hundred printer "drivers" you get a feel for just how much everyone else owns your computer, and that, yes, "security updates" may indeed be misnamed. I developed a strong appreciation for the detailed view of Task Manager, SNORT and WinPcap. I hated that so much of my attention was diverted from business and sunk into studying all the "legitimate" crap on my computer. Inkjets were the worst offenders and HP was the worst of the brands for crapware. I also remember developing a strong bias for a certain Asian "sewing machine brand" of cheap printers because their drivers and software was measured in kbytes TOTAL size and didn't try to sell me anything or collect info.
Is always format those things and replace it with a fresh install.
Get rid of all their shit software that does nothing useful.
These days you can probably get away with just installing linux.
That's always been a problem IMHO with any vendor pre-installed bullshit of any kind. Most of this turn-key OEM-installed bullshit isn't for the most of the crowd here, it's for the people who want that computer to 'just work' out of the box, and pre-installed with not-even-free versions of software packages anymore. This is such a non-story to me personally because over the last 20 year I've been into the tech/IT/computing realm of things, there's just way too many instances of this to cite of this going on at the big player level. It's here, and here for the 30 seconds of googling it too to refresh my memory.
I saw a lot of banter about installing Linux on this or that or 'Linux solves this issue' --- no it doesn't. I've ran Linux + X-windows + gnome/evolution/xfce window manager mixes since late 1990's on all my laptops and desktops to now in 2017; that's a preference. And the way Linux installs have become super mega friendly, tell me if you're in any worse a boat knowing every waking package you got installed on there? A great example is goa-daemon in Gnome Window Manager builds the last two years on most distros --- fuck that package. May not be spyware, but with all it's seemingly conspiracy-driven build-deps around it, I mind as well be trying to remove spyware.
My long winded point is: Please have that nephew, niece or some half savvy ass person in your life just put in a fresh install of Windows on that pre-bundled piece of OEM shit HP/Dell/Lenovo and anyone else in that space calling an 'Windows OS deployment'. I don't trust that shit and no one else should.
Linux is crapware. Thatâ(TM)s not a solution
Lenovo had $43 billion in revenue last year. If my math is correct, this "massive" fine is about what Lenovo makes in 43 minutes. That's not even a slap on the wrist.
... look at these Android apps that either track shit or have extraordinary permissions.
For Instagram: android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS
find accounts on the device
Allows the app to get the list of accounts known by the phone. This may include any accounts created by applications you have installed.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Why isnt everyone downloading the HP universal drivers. Its a driver only install.
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/solutions/business-solutions/printingsolutions/upd.html
No, something has changed. People have (within the last 10 years) become used to buying computers and keeping all the software that's on them. You and I want to buy blank hardware and then put the software on it, but the overall market and population is moving away from that, and even away from owners having the ability to do that.
The reason for this, is that if your computer fits in your hand, all the rules are different. If the computer fits in your hand, you're supposed to blow off all common sense, lose all your usual expectations, forget every lesson you learned since the 1970s, see hardware and software as something that needs to be integrated by the manufacturer, etc. Because the computer fits in your hand. That's the explanation. That's why.
I just don't know why that's why. But it's universally agreed that if a computer fits in your hand, all prevously-acquired common sense is inapplicable, but can't be re-acquired fresh. "Experience" and "learning" are bad words.
That rule only applies to handheld computers ("phones" they call 'em) but if you can get a person to use one of these "phones" enough, especially if they're young and impressionable, they can begin to see it as a new normal. Then if you present them with a non-handheld computer, their brain is fertile ground for insecurity, misplaced trust in manufacturers, expectations that the computer cannot be maintained, an attitude that the purpose of software is to serve the interests of the vendor in preference to the user, etc.
So yes, "normal" is changing. Who here doesn't know at least one person who owns an iPhone? Raise your hand.
No hands; thought so. Would an iPhone been considered even acceptable in 1997? Nowdays people don't even hide them or lie about owning one. One of your friends probably has one. And that's considered socially ok, not "hey, I've been meaning to talk to you about your swastika" territory.
HP started making SSDs. Will those have tracking software?
If he wisely invested in a Trebuchet Laser printer, he wouldn't have to constantly buy overpriced black powder cartridges just to have them run out two days before taxes are due.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The same shit happens all the time on my non-HP computer, but it's Windows 10 compatibility telemetry, and I hate it.
And HP was finally getting better on the design department... seriously, for all the crap I've thrown against HP laptops in the past, the current line looks a whole lot better design wise.
But of course it'd be one of the companies to also force the telemetry crap against users, because at it's core I guess it never changes.
Anyways, another one into the blacklist.
...I thought they were talking about HP's printer drivers. I've never seen a more bloated pig of a driver than these!
all that should be in the base windows 10 iso
Which should surprise absolutely nobody. Shit like this has been happening for a long time.
OEM installs of the OS are some of the worst pieces of shit on the planet, and not entirely different from the bullshit of branded Android. It installs useless crap which boils down to "assistants" which help you do stuff Windows already does better, it installs portals and other things designed to steer you to a branded experience (you know, where assholes get to make money), as well as ads and analytics.
I've never seen a single OEM OS install which wasn't riddled with shit which needed to be uninstalled, providing you could install it. And HP is definitely a company who likes to do crap like this.
It's all crap that bogs down the machine, does almost nothing at all to benefit the consumer, and just ads vectors for malware/spyware/adware and other crap.
It's pointless garbage the marketing department wants, but which takes a machine with decent specs and reduces it to a slow and frustrating piece of shit.
So, apparently in the new normal, HP have given up any pretense of not sucking. Now that they've spun off everything but the consumer division, they should drive themselves into the ground pretty quickly if they're doing crap like this.
HP has been managed by idiots for years, so hopefully they just get on with ruining what used to be a good company and leaving the rest of us alone.
From memory, their website uses the same design goals.
Requiem for the American Dream
Not to worry, Windows 10 comes with it's own called telemetry". Even with a m.2 drive, it was running for a few minutes every time I booted the machine with hundreds of megabytes of IO. That being said, it's a few times a month I boot as it is just my gaming rig, so I don't know if it does that if you boot it on a daily basis.
FYI.Creating a reg-key(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DataCollection) with the value of 0 seemed to help.
L'Idiot
I just don't know why that's why. But it's universally agreed that if a computer fits in your hand, all prevously-acquired common sense is inapplicable, but can't be re-acquired fresh.
Actually, it stems from the fact that it fits in your pocket.
Because of the small form factor, manufacturer try to integrate as many things as possible in the smallest place possible.
You end up with chipsets and SoC that contain modem directly integrated into them.
And for licensing and legal reasons, you can't modify that software your self (unless you hold you own very license to use emit on licensed frequencies like those used by cell-phones).
Which could be understandable, but now becomes extremely problematic if now, because of integration, this same modem core also doubles as the SoC's northbridge.
There might be some tiny advantage (in term of low power, wake on network activity, high speed transmission, etc..) but it's absolutely frightening that the RAM of the pocket computer which holds all your personal data is now under the charge of a binary firmware that you're not even legally allowed to modify anymore.
You can add to that other integrations of core (though less invasive ones) like GPU being part of the same SoC but only having blob drivers.
And once you have never-legally-user-controllable firmwares running, you get the rest of the bandwagon jumping in : All the various MAFIAA actors seeing this as an excuse to inflict even more invasive Digital Restriction Management (all this abuse just because some schmuch want to whatch netflix and want it right now on his pocket-computer, instead of waiting to get to a computer with a more media-viewing appropriate screen).
Then phone manufacturer using the presence of low-level locked stuff to make signed code execution mandatory - "In the name of safety" (which might make a tiny bit of sense in the rare edge case where the user of the device is not the owner of the device like corporate settings. But basically screws over the entire rest of the universe) and in the name of enforcing DRM.
But in practice giving them unstoppable ways to inflict ad-wares and other revenue generating crap.
And you end up with the current situation, where the most common everyday computer (the one that fit in your pocket), you can in theory "own it" (i.e.: buy it - i.e.: abandon a sizeable chunk of your fortune for the privilege of hosting it in your pocket) but in practice you can't decide what running on it (you can pick your poison but selecting a few apps, but all the key software remain in firm control of companies who have higher interest into profits than into end-users).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
HP has not made anything worth buying for many many many years. They used to make good printers in the 1990's, and calculators before that. Other than that they never made a single thing that was worth buying. In fact, you could not pay me enough to use a HP product of any type since the turn of the century -- anything from HP is that bloody bad.
I am surprised that the company itself is not bankrupt and out of business yet.
H/P wouldn't do that. Not without a possible profit anyway. They get away with this even though 'everyone' knows that Lenova got caught
some time back. Didn't H/P see that.? Must be some serious profits.. Blinding them to the reality of it all, the profit margin must be high
or H/P is desperate.. The people in the ad industry are no help, a bucks a buck. So they all try to profit from your purchase, hopefully...
HP has been selling PCs with Windows 10 for years now.
They don't even bother to hide this fact.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
When was the last time say, Debian randomly made you reinstall programs that the creators decided you shouldn't have? Like say, competing word processors?
Oh right, you're lumping in all distros together, AKA troll.
She's in college....The crashes were caused by all the crapware.
If I were you, I would have clean install a windows or whatever OS. Devices I personally maintain don't get vendor's crapware even from the start.
Unless they love to click on random stuff on the internet, then I would just give them a a bootable linux usb, because it will be the only thing they can use after their pc became slow as turtle.
Go to Local Services
Find HP Touchpoint Analytics
Charge Startup Type column to "Disabled"