| ▲ | likeabatterycar a day ago |
| Or the upload to their CDN was truncated or corrupted, and the signature check worked as designed. But let's not let an opportunity to paint Dell as some evil yet incompetent corporation slip through our fingers. |
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| ▲ | bhaney 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > This firmware update has been periodically failing since I got this laptop from work several weeks ago, and only today did I put in the effort to track down where it was hiding the logs with the real reason If they haven't pulled the "corrupt" firmware after it's been up and broken for weeks, I don't think anyone needs to rescind the "incompetent" label. |
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| ▲ | likeabatterycar 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | The only evidence we have is a single anecdote on Mastodon sparse on details and nothing you said can be validated. For all we know, the failure was in his employer's proxy server and the corrupt file was cached. Let's not wait for facts though, proceed immediately to the crucifixion of Dell. With everyone quick on the trigger to throw someone under the bus, imagine being a coworker in such a toxic environment. | | |
| ▲ | harry8 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | Crucifixion? Really? Come on now... I paid Dell a bunch of money for a laptop. They pushed a bios update, that ubuntu kindly relayed to me that meant when I closed the lid and put the laptop in my bag as I sat beside my daughter's ICU bed, it fried the motherboard. No really. That was the /purpose/ of the bios "upgrade." Warranty after they remotely fried my machine? No, because it worked as designed. So yeah going bayesian given none of us can be 100% sure about anything, my prior on Dell is they suck donkeys' gonads on all levels. Competence, honesty, service, everything - until evidence shows otherwise and I've just told you why. Why is your prior that Dell are competent even when evidence suggests otherwise? | | |
| ▲ | kaashif 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Can you give more information about what the stated purpose of the upgrade was? Surely they didn't actually tell you they wanted to brick your laptop remotely? | | |
| ▲ | zeven7 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I assumed it was a fast boot thing. I hate it and have been fighting it for years. I can’t believe a company of the size insists on being so anti consumer. | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm speculating, but recently there's been a trend to prevent laptops from sleeping by disabling the existing functionality, because... companies hate customers? This causes major problems for laptops that are ever located inside bags. | | |
| ▲ | SSLy 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > companies hate customers? clueless VPs want their products to behave like Apple's, but then beancounters won't sign a budget for iteration. MVP is shipped, turns out it's always buggy. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | What, Apple advertises sleep and then decides "you know what, even though it works fine, and is heavily used, and is essential for enabling laptops to be portable, which is the only advantage they have over desktops - we should just stop that from working"? Or is this more of a "Who's going to notice that the functionality they use every day has been disabled?" kind of idea? The only feature here is that you're no longer allowed to do something that was an important part of how the computer worked. That's the headline of the press release, and the goal of the software. |
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| ▲ | harry8 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yep. Best to do that without telling your customers that long established behaviour would kill it. Dell. |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Warranty after they remotely fried my machine? No, because it worked as designed. You can still sue them for frying your machine; it's not a legitimate intent for them to have. | |
| ▲ | likeabatterycar 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why would you voluntarily use an OS that installs BIOS updates (broken or not) without consent? It's egregious even if the timing wasn't inconvenient. | | |
| ▲ | harry8 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure wouldn’t ever again! At the time i was probably a little preoccupied and just clicked yes, safe in the delusion that no distro nor any hardware vendor would ever push a laptop bricking bios update. Sibling got it. Feel disabled sleep so if you didn’t shut it down and wait before closing the lid and putting in your bag it fried the mobo. Yeah. If you treated your laptop like a laptop the way you’d used it hundreds of times that was now like tossing it in the dishwasher. Unbelievable. Yet it happened. I hate Dell. I’m not letting go of that anger. Ubuntu, meh. Pretty poor but still not Dell. |
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| ▲ | zdragnar 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Surely for something so important, they'd verify it rather than let it sit around for the public to point out. At a minimum this is definitely a process failure due to incompetence. |
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| ▲ | likeabatterycar 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Maybe it was file system corruption, who knows? "Dell is posting unsigned update executables" is a loaded statement that implies this was intentional. Dell has been signing updates since before most infosec engineers were in middle school ogling cheerleaders. It's alarmist and highly unlikely this was intentional. | | |
| ▲ | dumpsterdiver 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That still wouldn’t excuse that someone clearly didn’t verify their work. No matter what the reason, ownership of this task was released before it should have been. | | |
| ▲ | likeabatterycar 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | You have no evidence of that not happening. It could be corruption after the fact or failure during replication. The armchair wolves already smell blood and are assigning blame before a postmortem has even begun. | | |
| ▲ | muppetman 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're right.
A headline of "Dell's website is serving up unsigned updates" would be correct. But to garner more clicks and hype that's not how they've worded their tweet, instead it's worded to make it sound like Dell are doing this on purpose. | | |
| ▲ | preciousoo 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | The original “tweet” didn’t attempt to infer reason or assign blame though. All it did is state two facts, according to their system |
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| ▲ | ddtaylor 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Dell is a large player in storage integrity for servers for exactly this purpose. |
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