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I was royally pissed off when I suspected my brand new Lenovo laptop was acting strange. The only in the end to stop it was to reinstall the OS, I then later found out it was the superfish issue

https://slate.com/technology/2015/02/lenovo-superfish-scanda...

I will never buy Lenovo again

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The problem is more or less all hardware manufacturers do that. There's variations: some bundle only the Windows backdoor, some bundle Superfish, some bundle Intel/AMD's anti-theft and ME/PSP features. That society is ok with that is a huge problem to say the least.

I doubt you can compare superfish against bloatware antitheft "feature"

And yet my CPU runs its own operating system (Minix) behind my back and reacts to undocumented secret commands i'm unaware of. Is the comparison that irrelevant?

I'm not defending ME/PSP at all, i would happily burn the CPUs off, if I could. I totally agree completely on your statement

> That society is ok with that is a huge problem to say the least.

but you could compare any bad actor actions to ME/PSP and say it's the same or not as bad

it's bordering on Whataboutery

I personally find the two questions awfully related: i'm buying hardware that performs operations without my knowledge/consent and answers to someone else's commands. Now one may genuinely believe there are valid usecases for this (i don't), but it's not exactly "whataboutism" as i'm definitely not trying to refute the original argument that pre-bundled malware is bad.

Although i personally consider hardware/firmware-level malware more troubling than OS-level malware which you can just wipe away by setting up a fresh system (which i recommend anyone to do when they receive a new machine, for related reasons).

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