Lenovo in hot water after shipping laptops with malware pre-installed.

Computer maker Lenovo has been shipping laptops pre-packaged with malware that makes you more vulnerable to hackers - all for the sake of serving you advertisements.

Made by a company called Superfish, the software is essentially an Internet browser add-on that injects ads onto websites you visit.

Besides taking up space in your Lenovo computer, the add-on is also dangerous because it undermines basic computer security protocols.

That’s because it tampers with a widely used system of official website certificates. That makes it hard for your computer to recognize a fake bank website, for instance.

Customers started spotting this on their Lenovo computers in mid 2014.

After facing a fierce backlash by customers and computer security experts this week, Lenovo acknowledged that "user feedback was not positive." As of January, Lenovo has stopped pre-loading the software on new computers, a company spokesman said. Lenovo also promised it "will not pre-load this software in the future" and said it disabled the feature on its servers, which essentially kills the program on everyone’s computer.

Source: Yahoo Tech

Bill Gates apologizes for Control-Alt-Delete login, slams IBM.

The Microsoft founder says the triple-key login should have been made easier, à la Apple's Macs, but that a designer insisted on the more complicated step.

 

"We could have had a single button. But the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't want to give us our single button," Gates said Saturday during a question-and-answer session to launch a Harvard University fund-raising campaign. His comments have gained attention since a video of his Harvard Q&A was posted on YouTube on Tuesday.

 

"And so we had ... we programmed at a low level that you had to ... it was a mistake," he said, throwing up his hands to laughter and applause from the crowd.

 

Gates defended innovation on the earliest Microsoft software though.

 

"We did some clever stuff," he said. "We were able to experiment with a lot of stuff, but more on the software side than the hardware."

 

Long the first interface step for PC users, Control-Alt-Delete still exists in Windows 8 as a way of either locking the computer or accessing the control panel. While the system defaults to a log-in screen, users may tweak their settings to return to the old way of logging on to Windows.

 

Sometimes informally called the "three-fingered salute," the login required users to use both hands and was intended to avoid accidental keystrokes from rebooting a computer.

 

Engineer David Bradley, a designer on early IBM computers, said he invented the combination as a shortcut during development.

 

"It was like a five-minute job in doing it. I didn't realize that I was going to create a cultural icon when I did it," he said "... I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous."

 

Source: CNN