Operations the size of Lenovo have a fairly intense vetting process before a product goes to market.
I find it very hard to believe that no red flags were raised by any of the engineers, managers and especially lawyers who must have screened this "feature" for problems.
It seems more plausible that the problem was known from the beginning (it is by design after all) and Lenovo decided to risk it.
My own experience makes me suspect the same thing. I used to work for a company that was, at the time, trying to develop a privacy-enhancing product (ironically enough...) which did something somewhat similar (although not on the size of this fuckup -- they'd be intercepting, but not tampering with, encrypted traffic, and storing encrypted private data).
Virtually everyone in the engineering team raised a flag when the imbec...uhm, the Product Manager came up with the idea. We pointed out that a) this burdens us with the responsibility of storing sensitive data which can, at least, have significant legal implications and that b) even if it's encrypted data, it may be a little hard to market a privacy device that works by uploading user data to our server as a first step without being transparent about the whole process. Oh, and c) that the data recovery mechanism he proposed (which involved storing the users' private keys on our servers as well, just in case they lost their precious little gimmick) was, in this case, entirely retarded.
The whole thing didn't even make it to Legal, because everyone in the decision tree just thought that since there's no plaintext data being stored, there's no potential for a lawsuit (and when we told the PM about Lavabit, he came back two hours later saying he Googled it and that we're covered since we're not an e-mail provider). The bright heads in Marketing weren't exactly sure about the whole transparency thing. They thought we should keep it simple and just tell people that their data is safely encrypted and be done with it, because end-users don't need to know about tech mumbo-jumbo like encryption keys and all that.
I don't work there anymore (thank God) and they haven't launched in the meantime, but when I left, they were basically working on implementing this clusterfuck.
I'm sorry I can't be more specific than this (for obvious reasons, I hope). The point is, however, that decisions as complex as these (there's a stack of paperwork thicker than the Osbourne-1 involved in preloading anything on a laptop) are made through an elaborate process, not made "by mistake".
Someone knew there was a problem. The problem may have ended up misunderstood or washed out along the decision chain (although I find that fairly unlikely), but someone, at some point, decided this was ok.
Once one vendor in your space says "we filter HTTPS traffic for nasty viruses!", it becomes a marketing weapon, and lots of customers think "well, why should I go with A when B protects me better?"
> Operations the size of Lenovo have a fairly intense vetting process before a product goes to market.
How does that go along with a gigantic fuckup like this? Ipso facto there was no vetting, otherwise this wouldn't happen. What did they expect, that this wouldn't come out, that this wouldn't damage their brand even further? If it was done out of malice it is still poorly vetted and incompetent malice.
Just repeat, “Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.”
They probably didn't figure out that anyone would have a problem with this. For them, it's just a cool gimmick to get some money. That it is a gaping security hole which makes about 0.42 % of user population mad, probably never occurred to them.
Unfortunately, for the 0.42 % (that is us, reading this site, and people of similar interests) it will be hard going to explain to the next 4.2 % why this is so bad. The remaining approximately 96 % of population will stay largely uninterested.
Yea, read again. I claim that even if there was malice there necessarily was an element of incompetence present in that case as well.
> it will be hard going to explain to the next 4.2 % why this is so bad
Why? People aren't interested in exact details, that's why they rely on 0.42%. You can illustrate the magnitudes of moronity required to design some of their products and lack of respect for security by explaining that they approach those that are needed to drive a car which has chainsaw strapped on its steering wheel. This isn't mere buffer-overflows due to bad coding, these are comatose levels of stupidity.
Hopefully we .42 will inform our fellow 4.2ers when they come to us for advice when buying a new laptop/anything Lenovo makes. I don't think it will be so hard to explain it to them. They already know what adware is. Just mention it comes installed ready to track you. Always listening while you're visiting bank.com.
I doubt the usual lawyer assigned to this understands SSL and certificates well enough to say anything about it. They worry mostly about contracts, and this is a technical thing.
"Any engineer" means something in HN, but we're not talking about "people who read HN" levels of engineer here, don't be mistaken.
Some people that have had no or limited experience with software are assigned to software projects, and that's the issue with companies like Lenovo.