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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.
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?
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.
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/
Or buy machines from vendors that offer vanilla Windows installations. Just be careful that the crapware isn't still there, masquerading as little driver configurators in the toolbar.
The one thing I cannot fathom is why any sane hardware supplier would ship their machines with Norton preinstalled. It's a notorious piece of crap, yet I find it on quite a few PCs. If someone asks me if "I can figure out why their PC is so slow", the first thing I do is ditch Norton: 9 out of 10 cases that fixes the problem.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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
Vendors get paid to install crapware like Norton. Then Norton makes money off of people who don't know any better.
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
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
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.
Lenovo settled a massive $3.5 million fine
This is why this sort of thing keeps happening. Massive? Not even close.
Last year, Lenovo's revenue averaged out to $4.9 Million USD PER HOUR. Congraulations, you fined Lenovo less that what they make in one hour.
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.
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.
Linux Mint. I used it on many computers without any problem. Running now on my Dell Precision m4800 (docking station connected to a LG 34" Ultrawide)) and Asus Zenbook 13". Everything is working fine.
I bought my Dell Precision in october 2014 (i7-4940MX, 32GB RAM, SSD, 1TB HDD, ...) and it's running like a brand new computer. It's fast, responsive, ... I'm a software engineer and I'm running a lot of stuff on it : VM, Dockers, Java development, ... I'll never get this performance with Windows installed on it. Not on a 3 years old laptop.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
Ubuntu would work just fine for what you are describing.
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
>"Ubuntu would work just fine for what you are describing."
And so will Mageia; easy to install, very friendly, rapid updates, good quality, long-term support. There are lots of choices. What they have in common is that they are all Linux distros and not MS-Windows. Linux might not be right for everyone, but it wins, hands-down, in so many ways, if you can get away with using it.
Supposedly, a "fresh" "generic" install of MS-Windows on a machine is still going to go right back to sucking in all kinds of crapware updates (even vendor-related ones), is huge, still has lots of backdoors and "spyware" (telemetry) baked right in, and still requires aggressive and continuous malware protection that steals a significant amount of resources. Certainly better than whatever setup comes out of the box from a Best-buy HP or whatever, but far from overall ideal.