Not true if you install Windows: http://www.techworm.net/2015/08/lenovo-pcs-and-laptops-seem-to-have-a-bios-level-backdoor.htmlits spyware is easily taken care of by doing a full reload of the OS
Do you trust them not to have spyware in their BIOS, or network, disk, USB, and webcam firmware? They certainly could do that, and we know they are willing to ship spyware in at least some situations.I don't really get the controversy of Lenovo as its spyware is easily taken care of by doing a full reload of the OS, and I do that anyway with all computers I buy, regardless of manufacturer, or OS.
I don't really get the controversy of Lenovo as its spyware is easily taken care of by doing a full reload of the OS, and I do that anyway with all computers I buy, regardless of manufacturer, or OS.
It may be that you do not know enough about what can be done with those embedded controllers. As wblock@ pointed out, there is no driver needed in order to have some stupid microcontroller on your mainboard do evil things.I don't care if they have spyware in those firmwares - they won't get activated without drivers that are aware of them. I'd rather trust Lenovo over Apple any day.
Really, the issue is how much you should distrust a vendor.
As far as Acer, some searching indicates there is a list of known BIOS supervisor passwords used by Acer or the Phoenix BIOS, so this issue is evidently not new. News to me, but I do not use BIOS supervisor passwords. There was a movement for open-source BIOS code at one point. No idea how practical it is.
I could be wrong, but I see no reason the developers of that project would be opposed to participation from developers of FreeBSD or any other open source operating system really. It would benefit everyone.The first sentence of the coreboot Wikpedia entry says, "coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS...".
But AFAICT, that has less to do with Lenovo and more to do with *BSD/Linux developers working around Lenovo problems. Here is an example.They always have phenomenal BSD support in most cases...
The current selection of open source BIOS alternatives doesn't match such an idealistic view. IMHO, if the alternative works well and the source code is available that's a big step forward from the status quo. Everything else is just icing on the cake.The issue I have with coreboot is it is GPL...