Blog about epic fails
In recent days the controversies have become strong against Dell after it was discovered that some of its laptop models came with a root Certificate Authority (CA) called eDellRoot preinstalled that can be easily compromised. The company quickly took steps to make available a program to correct the vulnerability but news came of another probleme similar on Dell PCs.
Lenovo preinstalled on some models (photo of a Lenovo Yoga 11 3 ©Pierre Lecourt) of its PC a utility called Lenovo Service Engine (LSE) that sends to its servers some information at the first connection to the Internet, according to the company anonymously. LSE automatically downloads another utility, OneKey Optimizer (OKO), which is supposed to optimize the operating system through some operations. LSE was discovered to use a technique that allows it to be automatic reinstalled even when the whole operating system is reinstalled from scratch and that can be a security problem.
The story of Lenovo computers with the Superfish adware preinstalled that causes a huge security hole started having legal consequences too. The first report arrived about a class-action filed in federal court against both Lenovo and Superfish, the company that produced the adware.
Her name is Jessica Bennett and she’s the owner of a Lenovo Yoga 2 PC, one of the models that were sold for a few weeks with the Superfish adware preinstalled. The plaintiff said that she noticed spam advertising with scantily clad women on her laptop. Initially she thought she suffered a hacking but searching on the Internet she found out that other people noticed something similar on other Lenovo laptops.
After discovering that her problem was due to a Superfish adware, Jessica Bennett decided to sue both Lenovo and Superfish. The allegations are that they compromised her PC’s security but also of invasion of privacy for financial gain.
The story of Lenovo computers sold with a pre-installed program called Superfish which has the unwelcome consequence of catastrophically undermining their security created quite a stir. This software was provided for a time with the new computers as a specific decision by Lenovo and only now it’s been recognized as a threat.
The story of the videogame SimCity, the latest version of the successful series with the same name, which was to revive a glorious name in the field of videogames, has instead become synonymous with failure. The big problems suffered by players in the early days that followed the launch of the new Simcity showed that Maxis, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts that developed it, made various mistakes.
