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Garrett: UEFI secure bootingGarrett: UEFI secure bootingPosted Sep 20, 2011 21:09 UTC (Tue) by augustl (subscriber, #75060)Parent article: Garrett: UEFI secure booting
My wish for the future was that I can buy a smartphone and install Windows Phone 7, Android, MeeGo, or something else, on it. Just like I can buy a PC and install a different OS than the bundled one. This seems to be the exact opposite, PCs gets to be locked down like smartphones.
I hope this never happens, and I'm glad LWN puts focus on it so we can start working against it asap.
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Garrett: UEFI secure booting Posted Sep 20, 2011 21:31 UTC (Tue) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
> I hope this never happens, and I'm glad LWN puts focus on it so we can start working against it asap.
If you have to "work against it", you have already lost. The only way to prevent such things is if consumers (including businesses, which will be the most impacted by this, so I suspect they might) vote with their $.
working against Posted Sep 21, 2011 9:40 UTC (Wed) by pdundas (subscriber, #15203) [Link]
> If you have to "work against it", you have already lost.
> The only way to prevent such things is if consumers > (including businesses... ) vote with their $.
EU and other anti-competition authorities MAY be persuaded to look askance at such a move.
The chance of this could be increased if Consumer Organisations and alternate O/S vendors (RHEL, OEL, etc) point out that this is anti-competetive lock-in, and that MS have significant market share, as the phrase goes, and that they used this market position to hugely increase the proportion of a PC's cost that goes on Windows over the past decade or two...
The MS move will harm Apple or any other potential MS competitor (and Linux is a competitor with economic importance in server space).
So, if regulatory capture can be avoided, that is one slow and unreliable route to oppose this MS abuse.
One solution could be to demand that purchasors of hardware (or o/s suppliers) be permitted to enable any other O/S they please, without charge, either on a case-by-case basis (with keys/signatures) or by turning off this "security". The former route would address the (transparently bogus) security rationale for the change - by preventing modified O/S from running WITHOUT permission.
working against Posted Sep 22, 2011 16:15 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
If you have to resort to regulating someone else's behavior in order to not voluntarily purchase something you don't want, you have already lost, against yourself.
Garrett: UEFI secure booting Posted Sep 27, 2011 12:29 UTC (Tue) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
The problem with "vote with your $" is that it implies one dollar, one vote.
Which is a fair cry from the ideals of "one man, one vote".
And fundamental aspects of our computing and network-infrastructure is no less important than, say, our electricity and road-infrastructure.
These things are *political* problems. They should be discussed and handled at a *political* level. Leaving them for the market to sort out (which is what you implicitly suggest with "vote with your $", isn't going to cut it.
Granted, on the political spectrum people with more cash (or otherwise more resources) are also more influential, but not quite to the same degree. (it's a trend we should fight there too - especially since current trends is that the middle-class gets reduced while the mega-rich turn into ultra-rich)
Deciding who gets to do what with which data, is a political question. Reducing it to a purely economical question, will ensure that the solution is one that benefits those with the largest purely economical interests.
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