I have a similar reaction to everywhere I've read this headline today. They're Star Citizen drop-outs if their departure was voluntary, and rejects if it wasn't. The bit that they'll have most demonstrated is how to take money from folks.

I'm a SC backer, and eagerly await its eventual release, and I'm totally comfortable with the economics involved with that product, but a team who DIDN'T bring it to fruition, who only did some immeasurable part, doesn't impress me. No, the currently released modules don't count.

Sure there's a point: we get to feel superior because we wouldn't be this dumb/criminal/evil/fraudulent/wrong.

It doesn't matter that the story is literally "two people who frequent some other web site say they looked at their neighbor's new laptop that the neighbor said they ordered sometime in early February and received sometime in late February and it's still got Superfish on it. Also, those two same somebodies say that when they ran the official Lenovo removal tool the software wasn't removed, by which they mean... some files and registry keys remained, which clearly means the software is functional and a problem."

Yeah.

"Two people claim one laptop may have shipped around the time this story broke, give or take, and can't be bothered to say/figure out if Superfish remains functional after removal."

I keep finding myself posting Lenovo-defending posts pretty much because the witch-hunt is way out of perspective.

One flick of your mouse scroll-wheel finger. That's what it takes for you to disregard an article that you don't care about. An article which - while having been conducted before - opens discussion of human timekeeping practices, which do impact IT issues.

Not everything in the universe is specifically for you.

No, that's not what is being said.

Yes, security software means a short-term subscription with Norton or similar. But the Lenovo-branded applications... you're just making stuff up. Lenovo has been shipping their machines for a few years now with a fairly reasonable package of management software. It'll do scheduled hardware tests (as best as software can possibly), keep BIOS/driver packages current, keep you informed as to expiring warranty status, and otherwise make it generally easy to find information on the product you own.

So hey, don't get informed, just jump on the Lenovo-hate bandwagon.

What? Wait. Grow some perspective.

Lenovo accepted remuneration in return for installing a program that injects ads and presumably reports statistics. How is that logically different from installing the Google Toolbar on IE? Right. It isn't.

Oh, but the software is poorly implemented and could allow unexpected access to the users' data. How is that logically different from installing Java, Flash, and Adobe Reader, each of which has repeatedly been found to massive security vulnerabilities? Right. It isn't.

Fact is, Lenovo didn't do anything new here. Certainly nothing illegal, all-caps or not.

Not to defend Lenovo in this, but yeah, that's not how it happened. Keep in mind they stopped installing this a month before they "got caught".

There's no reason to assume that Lenovo knew, or was told everything this software could do. Personally I would definitely attribute malicious intent to the developers of the software, not the company that agreed to install it.

Expecting Lenovo to manage to learn/know/discern every bug, flaw, or undesired side-effect of every software package they allow on the preload image isn't practical. I mean, if they preload Java, are they responsible when the computer gets hacked because it's buggy? Flash? Windows itself? A driver? What about CD-burning software that could potentially have a back-door or rootkit? Now, yeah, this was shit-ware to start with but it's hard to know exactly where to draw the responsibility line.

Regardless, this isn't a matter of stopping because they "got caught". They stopped before they got caught. They just didn't offer to fix things until after it was discovered just how bad it is.

This completely ignores that MH370 is (likely) a stationary, fragmented husk, spread over a significant portion of the ocean bottom (as in, below crush-depth), with zero emissions, and not in any way expected to support life. Strange how "two things in the water" can still have a bunch of important attributes that differentiate them.

There is no informational content to be gained by watching this video. There is plenty of emotional content to be gathered though.

The problem is that such intense emotional content won't help anyone react rationally. It'll just breed more hatred, which isn't good for anyone involved.

I'll give you two decades. Three, tops. Get going, I literally don't have forever to wait for this.

Take apart a scroll mouse. Turns out that it uses literally the same microswitch that the other buttons do. Ergo, it IS A BUTTON.

Weird. A decent mouse has detents so that there's a meaningful rotational force that has to be applied to cause scrolling. While accidental scrolling can happen, it's the exception, not the norm.

Good. That's an admirable goal. The greater the destructive potential of a vehicle, the more evident it should be. Making cars only evident in the visual spectrum is a poor choice, even at the cost of your evident need to sleep, rest, or otherwise concentrate while near a roadway.

Not so. There's a reason why bells are more or less constantly rung in China on bicycles; it's not unlike echolocation. Riders advertise their presence for safety purposes.

Just because [reason that is not the reason for the argument]... [stuff]. It's not a question about what we are accustomed to. We shouldn't continue to have seat-belts in cars because we're accustomed to them. We should continue to have them because they're a bloody safety feature.

Excellent, let's reduce the bidirectional safety measures because you want to hear your whale-song tranquility CD better. There are situations - real situations - where line-of-sight is blocked but usefully sound is not. You can currently hear cars around a corner, or behind an obstruction, before you step out, peddle out, or potentially make a lane change. Yes, it is everyone's responsibility to "be safe", but audible motor vehicles is a tool that aids in that endeavor.

People are occasionally killed in airplane crashes, which are very, very loud, and completely avoidable by walking everywhere instead of flying.

There is simply no good argument for allowing the removal of a useful side-effect, other than your personal tastes. Now, I admit there's a big difference between say, a Harley, or... um... my big-ass V8... and a typical car, in that there is such a thing as simply obnoxious. But silent cars? Bad idea.

On the PC, typically Odin is the only Windows executable involved with rooting an Android phone. Standard security best-practices should keep you "safe" here. Obtain Odin from trustworthy sites such as XDA. Use a bi-directional firewall package that tells you when your PC tries to make an outbound connection. Odin shouldn't.

On the phone, if you're just rooting, you're trusting the manufacturer of your phone, which isn't necessarily wise, but I see that's WHY you're rooting. So, you can get the XPosed Framework and XPrivacy, and set permissions for the various packages on your phone. Both are open-source.

If you don't actually read the code, then by definition you're trusting, period. So what's the issue?

I wrote some stuff responding to your attempt to rile me up, and it amused me intensely, at your expense, then I deleted it so you can't even reply to it. So thank you.

But I'm not going to stop trying to be helpful.

As it happens, the screen on the Pebble is a form of e-ink. It isn't the same oil-cell bubble technology used in many e-readers (including the one I "own") but it's marketed as e-paper because it's got many of the benefits of traditional e-ink while simultaneously not having most of the shortcomings of straight LCD. What, specifically, does that mean? Well, for instance it's fully transflective, meaning that it's perfectly viewable in daylight conditions (atypical for most LCDs).

Also, as designed, the display pulls very little power to maintain a given display. What pulls power is altering the display - as with traditional e-ink - but this too is addressed with admirable cleverness; it's designed so it doesn't refresh the entire screen, only horizontal lines that contain altering content. So with a watchface that isn't wasteful, you may only be redrawing a fraction of the screen at a time, leaving most of the display at maintenance pull. Traditional e-ink redraws the entire display each draw, and usually does so a total of three times; once to solid black, once to solid white, and once to draw the desired content, all to deal with the memory effect that traditional e-ink has. It's not actually a given than traditional oil-cell-based e-ink would actually net longer battery life.

Finally, the Pebble's screen is capable of a much higher refresh rate than traditional e-ink, so that non-watch applications can have smooth display. Admittedly, the vast majority of the time a user only redraws a portion of the screen once per second, but the capacity is there.

As for battery life, yes, five days is excrementally poor for a watch. Strangely, for a smartwatch it's not at all poor. I - an admittedly small sample of exactly one - find it no chore to find one night a week that I don't sleep with the Pebble on, so it can charge. Every other night of the week I wear it as usual, allowing it to wake me in the morning as my traditional digital watches have for the last... oh... nearly four decades. It also bears mentioning that the method the Pebble uses to get attention is vibration, not audible sound. At first I didn't know if I would like that, but in the end I've come to prefer it. Of course, physical movement is also battery-expensive, so that's another factor to keep in mind when comparing battery life to traditional watches; they just beep.

Dismiss the product if you will. Not everything is for everyone, but the Pebble is in a completely different category from every other smartwatch on the market in pretty much every way. Not expensive, not huge, waterproof, doesn't have a silly battery-intensive colour display. It's a very capable companion product that augments an existing device instead of trying to weirdly replace it.

It depends on what you define as a smartwatch. I'm very happy with my Pebble because it's exactly what I see as the limit of usefulness; a notifier. It's not a web browser or Google Maps screen. It doesn't have GPS and I can't make phone calls on it. It has no speaker, so it's not an audio player. All it does (for me) is put my phone's notifications somewhere I can see them without fumbling for the phone itself.

Oh. Five to seven day battery life. Because... low-cost e-ink smartwatch.

But you posted AC so you'll likely never see this hopefully helpful reply.