This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
How are they not getting sued for false advertising? In Europe at least.
It may not be sold in Europe. It's not listed on my local Lenovo website, or on any local marketplaces.
Might be just my country, so it's worth checking in others too.
All of these discoveries seem like catnip for lawyers everywhere. Like, how are these companies not going to lose absolutely billions just on lawsuits now?
Because it will only cost them "billions" if someone can come forward to the court and claim "billions" in damages. Good luck with that, when your product is a USB drive with flashy labeling.
Will you be the first to take them to court, to recover the damages from you being deceived for this dopey drive? The judge may actually award you double damages and order them to pay you $200!!!!
catnip for lawyers everywhere
lololololololololololol!!!!!!
That’s what class actions are for…
In the EU most (all?) members have a state-run consumer watchdog organization that can and does escalate measures depending on how big the problem is and how many people are reporting it.
But something like this wouldn't typically make it to the watchdog because there's also consumer law in place to allow people to return faulty/unfit devices. So bad products like these typically get absorbed by merchants and importers, who would find themselves unable to shift that particular product and turn it back to Lenovo. Eventually Lenovo can't find anybody willing to buy the product and have to take the hi[n]t.
The beauty of this system is that it turns the problem back to the commercial side. It takes the regular people (buyers) out of the problem and makes merchants/importers/manufacturers figure it out among themselves. The idea being that "market forces" are real and they work but they shouldn't be inflicted on unsuspecting customers.
It still affects the buyers, though. If I get hacked because I bought crappy "encrypting" hardware, I may not even care about getting my 20 bucks back because I just lost thousands and my life is ruined.
It's a beautiful and appealing idea that market forces will regulate everything if you just let things go. But we've tried that for long enough now to see that the real world is too complex and the consequences of bad regulation are too serious.
From the article it practically sounds like an Aliexpress rebranding, good gravy
The fingerprint reader only enabled the USB connection, and nothing on the card was actually encrypted.
Pathetic
"Encrypted with ROT-0!"
This is the Internet, so you guys can't see my face. Permit me to describe it to you as "unsurprised".
Kind of like that, yeah, but with a solid helping of "I tried to warn you idiots two decades ago, and you dismissed me as alarmist" thrown in for good measure.
Present company excluded, obviously.
Well.... this is just another reason to never activate biometrics. Police typically need a warrent for passwords, not for biometrics.
Even with passwords they just attach some Israeli hacker machine and they'll break in
No that only works in some instances. A correctly configured not iOS computer should be resistant to that.
Until they find a CVE they can use sure
Plenty of those in motherboards, TPMs, CPUs, software, OS, etc.
biometrics were never safe to begin with.
you cant be forced to give a password.
but they can physically force your finger onto a reader. physically restrain you to do a face scan, and forcibly hold you down for an eye scan. They are not safe, or secure. Biometrics are less secure than setting your password to 1234 and carving "password is 1234" into your keyboard.
I mean... you can absolutely be forced to give up your password. They just might keep it quiet...
No, you choose to give up the password. You can die without ever giving up. You can choose to go to jail without giving it up. You can choose to be fired without giving it up.
Even if you die, your biometrics can still be used against you, against your will
With or without biometrics, you can just take the sd card out and boom, no need for a finger print
They have a really long history of doing this stuff. Including outright espionage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_incidents
https://legioncyber.com/insights/lenovos-security-failures-and-hidden-risks/
This last one is more about just poor quality.
https://www.lawsuitupdatecenter.com/lenovo-class-action-lawsuits.html
Never understood the thinkpad craze. "Military grade" means cheap as fuck.
“Military grade” means cheap as fuck.
Cheap as fuck yes, but also a giant rip-off as well. It isn't military grade without that skimming off as much of that military industrial complex dollar as possible.
The old ones were durable as hell.
You mean when IBM made them?
And for a few years after, until Lenovo started lifecycling them and the enshittification began.
So you can bypass the fingerprint physically? Is that right?
How did they think they could get away with that
They're the people making the next GrapheneOS hardware. There's some interesting cognitive dissonance.
The GrapheneOS people are using CPU level hardware security functions provided by Qualcomm, I'm assuming the partnership means they get proper access to drivers and Motorola / Lenovo won't be modifying the CPU.
Now there's still plenty of room for shenanigans in other places like the modem and various interconnects and the motherboard and all that, but at least there's some baseline security provided there using ARM secure boot and hardware level exploit protection in the CPU, etc.
The actual people involved in phone design atd manufacture wouldn't even have a manager in common with the people that produced this
Lenovo has fallen from grace. The last decade they were just riding the reputation they had when they were under IBM, while they cut cost and lowered quality.
FU100 lmao
for context
The FU100 is “just an SD card in a fancy case,” Li said in a March conference talk. It is, as a result, trivial for anyone with physical access to get to the drive’s data.
I bet some engineer was tasked with the whole thing, under budget, over extended, and had their whole team cost savings cut from covid when they built that.
Lenovo slap their brand on all sorts of mass produced tat in their colours. All the tech companies do it for these sorts of products.
so it's literally a woo-woo drive?
Lenovo has always been trash; like it's not that bad style. The best was the ~~clit~~ mouse thing.
Just ran all the way to the informal side of the spectrum
In the middle should be "eraser."
Well, it’s Lenovo. So…
