Unfortunate Superfish

I hope this doesn't taint the name "Superfish".

In case you missed it, this week came the news that Lenovo, the Chinese computer company (to whom IBM sold their ThinkPad laptop series) had been installing on some of their computers a rather nasty tracking software called Superfish Visual Discovery.

I would have paid that much attention to stuff like this weren't it for two reasons: (i) I own a rather new Lenovo laptop and (ii) I am familiar with the name "Superfish" but under a different context.

Luckily, after doing a thorough check of my system, I found no sign of this intrusive software. As for the second reason, there is a rather popular software called "Superfish" out of Los Alamos National Lab that we use quite often. It is a Poisson EM solver often used to solve for EM fields in complex geometry/boundary conditions. I'm guessing that they gave it that name because "poisson" is French for "fish", and it really is a super software! :)

It is unfortunate that in the context of computer technology, the name Superfish is "poison".

Zz.