When I lived in China I hung out with few of the Chinese hacker-types. I was into watercooling, modding, and mech kb's, and there wasn't a huge market there at the time so I hung out a bit with the few folks that were into it. They were always talking about stuff they and their friends were working on. I had a bit of knowledge in the area so I often joined in their discussions. Basically it's blatantly common knowledge that the government there conducts industrial espionage on foreign high-tech firms, both as a end and as a means to develop their offensive cyberwarfare capabilities. The information they acquire they then trade to domestic companies for hardware-level and rootkit-level access to their products. I've seen some of the stuff at work, and it's pretty nutty. My friend had two hdd's from a well-known company, visually indistinguishable from each other, but one had a custom rootkit installed that intercepts I/O and records it all to a special area of the hdd. I saw this working in person. They talked about the different ways different firms put these into their products, with Lenovo and Huawei right in the thick of it. Among other things, Huawei helps the state intell. and PSB develop custom carrier updates which allow special access to phones. So say you're a foreign exec and you travel there, the moment you turn on your phone the tower pushes out a malicious update to your phone [I never saw this myself, but one of the guys was a phone OS programmer and was always railing on this].
This is only just a small part of it all, just mostly what I saw with my own eyes or the data of on a screen. No, it's not only Lenovo that does this, but they are a major player in supplying tech to a lot of the world. Some even wonder if the state injected cash to help them buy IBM's consumer division in order to facilitate these types of activities. I'm not so sure, but I guess it wouldn't surprise me.
Anyway, I didn't intend this post to be so long. Sorry to derail. Back to gushing about your Thinkpads.
