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HP is rolling out "HP Touchpoint Analytics Service" onto computers without user consent:
Lenovo has only just settled a massive $3.5 million fine for preinstalling adware on laptops without users' consent, and now it seems HP is getting in on the stealth installation action, too. According to numerous reports gathered by Computer World, the brand is deploying a telemetry client on customer computers without asking permission.
The software -- first identified on November 15 -- is called "HP Touchpoint Analytics Service" and appears to replace the self-managed HP Touchpoint Manager solution. According to the official productivity description, it features "the tools you need to ensure all your managed devices' security -- and brings you greater peace of mind". The problem is, it's installing itself without permission and is wreaking havoc on customers' systems.
Also at Computerworld and gHacks.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @09:13PM (1 child)
Good luck getting that install media. I burned a copy for my dad when I set up his Acer using their preinstalled software (they didn't actually provide a disk in the box). A few years later, the disk is toast. I swap the disk and ask him for the install disks. Doesn't have them. Ok, he upgraded to Windows 10 when they were shoveling it on people, so I try to download the disks from Microsoft. Rejected, it says I need to use OEM disks and then upgrade. So I go to Acer, and browse their terrible website to find the download spot. Oh, they don't have a download spot, I need to go to another place to buy them for $15 plus shipping. Put the required info on that page and what's this, they don't have any disks for that particular model for sale and I should contact chat? What is this, chat is no help and just tries to upsell me to a new one. KTHXBYE.
Good thing I'm not completely inept, as I managed to get it to work. I ended up copying their UEFI partition, recovery partition and custom MBR from the old dead drive image I took (as no combination worked without all three), and then managed to correct the necessary information to get recovery mode to boot. Thank goodness the recovery partition had a file full of SHAs and MD5s of files to verify that the recovery partition was completely undamaged.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday November 30 2017, @09:55AM
I didn't think this was such a problem these days. The installation image of Windows 10 is freely available from Microsoft, [microsoft.com] so you 'just' have to worry about the activation/licence. On at least some out-of-the-box machines, there's a Windows 10 licence issued against the hardware IDs, so you don't even need an activation code, it 'just works' when Windows 10 does its online licence check.
Rejected?