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On 21/08/15 09:12, Julian Hall wrote: > Hi All, > > Received this from a friend. You're all a bit late on this - it's been in the wild for months and in the tech news for weeks. There's an incredibly vague news article today noting that Lenovo are probably just about to get busted *again* for some kind of unsavoury crapware shenanigans: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/08/22/0723225/yet-another-compromising-preinstalled-glitch-in-lenovo-laptops Nothing to worry about for this crowd, 'cos you're all going to be installing Linux over the pre-installed Windows on your Lenovo laptops right? This is a windows-only thing: the UEFI can be set to automatically trigger actions such as file upgrades/reinstalls but relies on an actual windows install being in place to hand over it's trigger commands to and actually carry out - it's not like the lifecycle controller functionality you get on a modern Dell rack server for example which can boot to UEFI and then use ftp to contact Dell repositories and upgrade all of it's own firmware/BIOS/UEFI/etc components. So feel free to keep your tin foil hats on but you don't need to throw out your computers quite yet: this is just Lenovo being absolute morons. You also only get this on bargain basement cheap-as-chips Windows Home models - your nice expensive business orientated ThinkPad's will be free of this financially motivated crapware. I know there's a fair amount of FUD about UEFI around here, but this is just a single stupid OEM inappropriately leveraging a legitimately useful feature for their own gain: they've already been caught, making it considerably less likely than any other manufacturers will try the same trick. I for one don't miss the stupid brain-dead legacy BIOS one bit. I guess what I'm saying is don't fear UEFI, don't buy Lenovo and keep calm and carry on. Oh, and install Linux, obviously. Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq