Lenovo has faced multiple serious scandals and negative incidents that have significantly damaged its reputation, particularly around security, customer trust, and transparency.
Adware Scandal (2015): Lenovo pre-installed Superfish VisualSearch on thousands of laptops, which injected ads into web searches and installed a universal self-signed root certificate. This allowed man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, exposing users’ encrypted traffic—including passwords and banking details—to anyone on the same network. The private key for this certificate was identical across all affected devices, making it trivial for attackers to exploit. Lenovo initially denied the threat, claimed the software was safe, and only issued a removal tool after intense public and media backlash. Even then, the tool removed the adware but left the dangerous root certificate in place, giving users a false sense of security.
UEFI and Firmware Backdoors (2015–2025): Lenovo shipped laptops with UEFI-based installers that could reinstall software even after a full OS reformat. Security researchers found persistent firmware-level malware that could not be removed by standard reinstallation. In 2025, reports from Bloomberg suggested U.S. military investigators found backdoored chips in Lenovo motherboards capable of logging keystrokes and transmitting data—though Lenovo denied knowledge.
ThinkPad Spyware (2015): Lenovo was found to have pre-installed Omniture software (a web analytics tool) on ThinkPad and ThinkCentre devices, which collected detailed user behavior data, including keystrokes and browsing habits. This was done without clear user consent and sparked privacy concerns.
Customer Service Failures and Refusal to Refund (2022–2026): Multiple users report fraudulent replacement practices, such as sending lower-spec laptops than ordered (e.g., a 1TB SSD instead of 2TB), refusing refunds, and ignoring customer complaints. One user reported being denied a refund for over a year despite returning a defective gaming laptop, with Lenovo repeatedly failing to respond or escalate cases—even after threats of legal action.
Product Misrepresentation and Delayed Shipments (2022): Customers reported false delivery timelines—such as a Cyber Monday order taking over a month to ship—leading to missed deliveries and poor communication. One Reddit user called it a "scam" due to misleading advertising and unresponsive support.
Security and Trust Erosion: The repeated pattern of pre-installing dangerous software, ignoring security warnings, and failing to act responsibly has led to widespread distrust. Experts and users alike now warn that Lenovo devices may be compromised at the firmware level, and many advise avoiding Lenovo products for sensitive or secure tasks.
These incidents reflect a recurring pattern of security negligence, poor customer service, and questionable business practices, raising serious concerns about Lenovo’s integrity and long-term reliability.
I understood the point of Tauri is to write the apps with Typescript and web tech and to NOT have to write Rust or even know Rust. So why would it need to be ported to Swift when the point of Rust in Tauri just so the devs themselves or the wider community can write the base and plugins and stuff in Rust and the apps the general dev writes with it are written in TS?
I looked at Tauri like an Electron alternative that in the future will run with Servo under the hood.
This is exactly that by thought was. This solves nothing what the traditional VPN or TOR is used for. It's like running an exit node from your hope IP address. You do not want to do that.
I LIKE this. Why would you not use a distro if it just removes packages? Or force closed source on you if it's legal to install the binaries? I do not know it's the same on Ubuntu, but I consciously made the decision and typed out the valkey package. If I would not know now about all the BS and would just want Redis I would LOVE for my distro to just install a replacement without me noticing anything. Maybe with a little hint and conformation message during install why this is happening and that is it. Hats off to Fedora maintainers, this is how you make the end user happy!
"We heard from some customers that it is easier for them to operate under an OSI-approved license, so we’ve added that option." ROFL.
Yeah, translation. We got the biggest backlash ever from the license change, the community HATED us so much for this. THIS is why we backpedaled.
Valkey was created and already took over Linux distro package distributions with easy AF drop in replacements installs. I installed Valkey on my VPS for a WordPress Object Cache and I just installed the package, did not even need to edit any file or anything, just runs and works and the WP plugins for Redis just thinks it's Redis. Besides the name as an end user, literally nothing changed. Valkey got a massive interest and if clearly became obvious that it made zero sense, and it was the wrong decision.
Check out our demo at https://demo.rybbit.io/1. We have a lot more features than Plausible, but they're still presented in a way that is intuitive to use. You shouldn't need to read pages and pages of documentation to be able to set up funnels on rybbit, for example.
Dude wastes the FSFs time, complains about wrong license without telling them the one he wanted. Then complains again that he needs to recover from the HORROR of using the postal service that was a deliberate, POINTLESS CHOICE. Gets fame on Hacker News for it.
I hope the future is bright with AV1. But even scene groups heavily release in 265 instead of AV1. Hardware support is going to get better over the years and hopefully everyone will just use AV1 and leave this license BS behind.
> But even scene groups heavily release in 265 instead of AV1.
I believe this is because scene groups don't really care about patent licensing, and there's around 5-6 years of computers with hardware H.265 decoding and no hardware AV1 decoding. I think we'll see AV1 and successors take over in 5-10 years when it's safer to assume users will have AV1 decoding.
I bought an Intel Arc A580 and then later B580 which also has an AV1 hardware encoder, and I have to say that it's really pleasant, good enough for real time streaming, video recording even at lower bitrates (e.g. 1080p30 at ~10 Mbps is okay) and ends up saving a lot of space when compared to both H264 and H265, which previously wasn't viable because the CPU based encoder is painfully slow.
I saved a few hundred GB of space by re-encoding all of my local videos in AV1, I'm guessing it might be have been one of the better cases because most of the videos were anime instead of more detailed video like regular movies, but it worked out nicely for me! Plus, the software support is also quite good: OBS and Handbrake had no issues, neither does VLC seem to have any.
All of that makes me wish it'd become more widespread in the next decade or so, everywhere from YouTube and Twitch to even our phone cameras.
FWIW Most Streaming TV Services like Zattoo do 1080p50 using H264 using that Bitrate and while not perfect it's fine - using AV1 one could probably go way below that.
1080p30 at ~10 Mbps isn't a low bitrate unless you are aiming for something very specific. Not to mention there is H.265 hardware encoder inside Intel Arc, although I have no idea about their quality. Nvidia seems to do a much better job in this area.
If you record a video game, I find that anything much lower really messes with the visual quality, especially if it portrays a forest scene or something with lots of detail like snow. Admittedly, you have to zoom in to notice and it's more apparent during fast movement, though VBR and other options seem to help.
The H265 encoder is also lovely, from what I've seen! Bigger file sizes, but a bit more software support in some places.
To be honest, if a 15 year old machine is still working fine for somebody, and h.264 is fine (if you don't care about HDR/4k, it really sort of is!), I'm not sure the benefit of suggesting somebody junk a machine
I have considered, but so far there's no other hardware which has this form-factor with Libreboot support (although I'm unsure whether the X230 has x265 hw accel)
My guess is you were using the reference AOM encoder. This is actually a real branding problem! It was never designed for encoding speed, and it shows.
SVT-AV1 is the production encoder you should be using. It's high quality and fast in software, and should really always be the default.
For now most of the focus has been on the slow encodes, but in theory it can match h264 for speed and quality on encoding. In practice I've seen it get very close already.
Emulates it, which strikes me as extremely silly. The original grain is in the film itself, it's part of it, it's what the image is made of. Fake grain is just noise. Either denoise it or keep the real grain, I have no interest in fake grain.
Probably? Though I don't think those kinds of controls are exposed in most of the players I use (usually set-top box video players). Besides, if I'm dealing with a 20 to 80GB 4k copy of something that originally had grain, I prefer it still be present—if I'm dedicating that kind of space, the point is fidelity. If I'm dealing with something smaller than about 8GB 1080p, I probably don't really care what it looks like aside from preferably not having obvious artifacting, so I guess AV1 would be OK in that case, though all else being equal I'll still pick h265 just to avoid the fake-grain concern entirely.
I don't watch a ton of films with noticeable fake grain. Even the ones that do fake it, it's barely perceptible, so I wouldn't care on those—not many of them are emulating the huge, obvious grain of high-sensitivity '60s and '70s film, for instance. A lot of what I watch is from the '90s or earlier, so the grain's real.
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