The story about how secure boot for Windows 8, part of UEFI, will hinder the use of non-signed binaries and operating systems, like Linux, has registered at Redmond as well. The company posted about it on the Building Windows 8 blog - but didn't take any of the worries away. In fact, Red Hat's Matthew Garrett, who originally broke this story, has some more information - worst of which is that Red Hat has received confirmation from hardware vendors that some of them will not allow you to disable secure boot.
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Member since:2009-08-18
Member since:2011-01-28
lucas_maximus,
"As I said ... there will be shitty manufacturers that would give you this option ... where they don't care about their customers ... and there will be those that do. That is my answer to your question."
No, you didn't answer my questions.
I get the impression that you don't care that secure boot has the potential to harm linux adoption. If that is your opinion, then ok, you are part of the majority of people who may very well remain unaffected by this change. It is true that linux users are a fraction of the market.
However, you cannot reasonably dismiss the concerns of hardcoding MS keys into the bios on behalf of those of us who are regular linux users at home. We are the ones affected by this change, even if you are not. We don't want artificially restricted hardware, new or used, that prevents us from running our OS of choice. The vast majority of us started by running linux on a previously windows machine. Microsoft still hasn't addressed whether dual booting will be possible. It isn't at all unreasonable for us to object when our interests are at stake, even though yours are not.
I'll ask once again: If it were up to you to design an ideal secure boot feature, would you design secure boot by hardcoding exclusive MS/OEM keys into it? Or would you enable the owner to override those keys?
Seeing as you keep avoiding the question, I'll take the liberty of answering it for you: It depends on who the feature is being designed to protect, microsoft or the owner.
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Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
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Member since:
2011-01-28
lucas_maximus,
I'm not sure how your post relates to the questions in my post which you responded to?
***Hypothetically*** speaking, would you have a problem if 100% "designed for windows" OEM PCs were locked to microsoft?
If 100% makes you uncomfortable, then what hypothetical percentage would you be comfortable with? Isn't the scale of damage to the linux community proportional to the ubiquity of MS locked machines (whoever is responsible)?
Edit: I'd like to ask this again: if you were designing secure boot, would you hard code OEM/microsoft keys into it? Or would the owner have control over who's signatures to trust?
Edited 2011-09-25 01:02 UTC