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Comment by eric-hu | Hacker News Reader

This raises an interesting paradox to me. How would the people writing the marketing copy for any product that was supposedly Superfish-resilient actually know that it was?

Is the solution to simply not have marketing around such technical details? Is there a solution?

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> This raises an interesting paradox to me. How would the people writing the marketing copy for any product that was supposedly Superfish-resilient actually know that it was?

A big difference is that Dell's inclusion of the private key appears to be a (major) screwup by someone with technical responsibility[0], whereas Superfish was downright intentional and involved people all over the company.

In that light, this doesn't really appear to be a paradox - no company should ever market themselves as being immune to mistakes and/or breaches. But it's pretty straightforward to live up to promises that you won't intentionally compromise all security whatsoever just to make a few ad dollars (which is what Lenovo did).

[0] As far as I can tell, there's no evidence that Dell benefits in any way from shipping the private key, so I'm going to invoke Hanlon's razor until we discover otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

But it would be a screw up in Dell's core activity. It's like Intel screwing up the design of the Xeon. I would be surprised if this didn't get approved by many people before going ahead.

> But it would be a screw up in Dell's core activity. It's like Intel screwing up the design of the Xeon. It's like Intel screwing up the design of the Xeon.

I'm not really sure I'd say that this is comparable to Intel screwing up the design of the Xeon.

But either way, there's a big difference between "we made a serious technical error, and nobody at the company caught this" and "we intentionally compromised our entire product because advertisers were willing to pay us, and nobody at the company stopped this".

At least on the consumer end, I'd say Dell's "core activity" is hardware, not software. This is more like Intel selling software that can screw up your computer: https://www.mcafee.com/

Hardware and the drivers associated.

Many hardware companies regard software as an afterthought, not a core activity; it's often outsourced.

This isnt marketing peoples job.

If you want a fun corporate PR check out Microsofts http://niewspierajhakera.pl/

This is a Polish anti piracy campaign equalling everyone who calls himself a Hacker to ISIS terrorist and pedophile :/ Thats right, they uploaded YT clips showing "hackers" in balaclavas collecting child porn. At the very same time Microsoft openly calls polish makers Hackers in another part of corporate portal.

You'd really think that was a parody website if it wasn't for the fact that the domain is indeed registered to Microsoft.

>How would the people writing the marketing copy for any product that was supposedly Superfish-resilient actually know that it was?

They just write whatever sells.

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