Adware = Malware (Lenovo and https)
This stuff is hardly to be believed. According to the EFF:
Lenovo Is Breaking HTTPS Security on its Recent Laptops
News broke last night that Lenovo has been shipping laptops with a horrifically dangerous piece of software called Superfish, which tampers with Windows' cryptographic security to perform man-in-the-middle attacks against the user's browsing. This is done in order to inject advertising into secure HTTPS pages, a feature most users don't want implemented in the most insecure possible way.
Lenovo has not just injected ads in a wildly inappropriate manner, but engineered a massive security catastrophe for its users. The use of a single certificate for all of the MITM attacks means that all HTTPS security for at least Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari for Windows, on all of these Lenovo laptops, is now broken. If you access your webmail from such a laptop, any network attacker can read your mail as well or steal your password. If you log into your online banking account, any network attacker can pilfer your credentials. All an attacker needs in order to perform these attacks is a copy of the Superfish MITM private key. There is (apparently) a copy of that key inside every Superfish install on every affected Lenovo laptop, which has now been extracted and posted online.
In MPG’s view, this should permanently exclude Lenovo from anyone’s consideration, for any product. Lifetime blacklist. For that matter, any vendor pre-installing adware should be blacklisted also. Finally, this ought to be dealt with severely; an immediate import ban on all Lenovo products in the USA and EU seems appropriate.
See also How to Remove Superfish Adware From Your Lenovo Computer.