The Lenovo Initiative

Recently Lenovo announced that they will allow their laptops to be "locked down" by means of a text message sent to them. Presumably this feature has been added to prevent stolen laptops from yielding the owners' personal information, but we know better. Our operatives tell us that Lenovo has been conducting experiments with this technology for some time, and that the true intent is to allow Lenovo to cause "random hardware failures" on its hardware by sending out text messages (obviously right after the expiration of the warranty) that tell different components of the computer to shut themselves down until Lenovo tells them to wake up.

While we disagree with the decidedly monetary motives for this kind of technology, we have been working with the US government to include such technology on the military equipment they sell overseas. It would allow them to generate more revenue through a subscription model and everyone knows that more defense funding is always good.

Surprisingly, though, the military has expressed concerns about the "security weaknesses" of this model. They seem to fear that some rogue individual or group of future dictators with a cell phone could shut down the entire US Army. Oh, well, maybe someday.