Wednesday, March 30, 2011

I've thought of buying a laptop a few times, but if I do Updated

it looks like Samsung is NOT under consideration:
The supervisor who spoke with me was not sure how this software ended up in the new laptop thus put me on hold. He confirmed that yes, Samsung did knowingly put this software on the laptop to, as he put it, "monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used." In other words, Samsung wanted to gather usage data without obtaining consent from laptop owners. While in the Sony BMG security incident described in the first article in this pair one had to buy and install the CD on one's computer, Samsung has gone one step further by actually preinstalling the monitoring software on its brand laptops. This is a déjà vu security incident with far reaching potential consequences. In the words of the of former FTC chairman Deborah Platt Majoras, "Installations of secret software that create security risks are intrusive and unlawful." (FTC, 2007).
Update: Now they're saying it was a case of security software misidentifying a file; question then is why the supervisor at Samsung said it WAS what the guy suspected?



Michelle Malkin has a post up on Gunwalker, with lots of links.


What was that from Obama about 'no American troops on the ground' again?


What kid of useless damned ass-kisser of dictators is Jimmy Carter? This kind.

1 comment:

Sigivald said...

From the link, which has been updated since yesterday:

"Samsung has issued a statement saying that the finding is false. The statement says the software used to detect the keylogger, VIPRE, can be fooled by Microsoft's Live Application multi-language support folder. This has been confirmed at F-Secure and two other publications, here and here. Still no explanation for why Samsung originally confirmed the keylogger's existence to Hassan, as seen below"

Independent confirmation that Samsung laptops don't ship with a keylogger; the only baffling question is why anyone at Samsung would claim they had.