Is Samsung intentionally shipping laptops with keylogger/spy software?

[jamescv7]

As Samsung has been experiencing greater global successes in selling their TVs, phones and laptop computers, they may have made a major miscalculation into how far "market research" can go without causing a massive backlash. If this story turns out to be true, they may have crossed the line.

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/03/30/samsung-intentionally-shipping-laptops-with-keyloggerspy-software/

 

[Valentin N]

Update: Fortunately the answer appears to be no. It appears this was all a misunderstanding. Samsung has issued a statement saying the confusion was derived from the installation of the Microsoft Live! application suite. When the Slovakian language is installed it creates a folder called C:\Windows\SL which is the same folder name as is used by the StarLogger application.

Cnet.com is reporting that they looked at a Samsung series 9 and did not find the keylogging software. This could indicate it is only being installed on one series (R), or in fact Samsung is not behind its installation.

source

 

[Ink]

I was reading about this on Engadget last night, before going to sleep. Looks like VIPRE was the software to detect it.

Update 2: Samsung's official Korean language blog, Samsung Tomorrow, has a posted an update calling the findings false. According to Samsung, the confusion arose when the VIPRE security software mistakenly identified Microsoft's Slovene language folder ("SL") as Starlogger, which Sammy was able to recreate from an empty c:\windows\SL folder (see image above). So yeah, move along, it's much ado about nothing -- the R525 and R540 laptops are perfectly safe.

Edit: I added link and quote from Engadget.