Another approach to UEFI secure boot [LWN.net]

Another approach to UEFI secure boot

Posted Oct 18, 2012 7:06 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
Parent article: Another approach to UEFI secure boot

It seems worth noting that making users answer "are you sure you want to run this possibly insecure thing?" closely resembles the way MS succeeded in killing DR-DOS. Of course nowadays few labor under any illusions about how secure or reliable MS products are. Such a question might only lead people to make sure they weren't accidentally about to start up windos.

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Are you sure you want to run this possibly insecure thing?

Posted Oct 20, 2012 3:32 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I'm not aware of how this killed DR-DOS.

To me, that wording is just pointless because it translates to, "do you want me to do what you just told me to do?" I get that from web browsers all the time - do you want to see the web page you requested or not? Followed by technical jargon that couldn't possibly help any but the most dedicated nerd determine whether there is a security issue with looking at that page.

But I have no doubt we'll see wording like that, and people will just automatically hit "please proceed." The proper wording would be, "You're about to boot something not distributed by Microsoft. If that wasn't your intent, stop now because someone is trying to take over your computer. Otherwise, carry on."

Are you sure you want to run this possibly insecure thing?

Posted Oct 20, 2012 3:52 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

Microsoft added text very similar to this warning that running on DR-DOS was unsupported and may cause windows to do bad things.

Per later lawsuits, we learned that Microsoft did this to try and kill of DR-DOS, and to all appearances (including from the Microsoft viewpoint) it worked.

Are you sure you want to run this possibly insecure thing?

Posted Oct 29, 2012 0:13 UTC (Mon) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

Well, DR-DOS/OpenDOS is still around as an embedded OS, and some versions are open source even (although FreeDOS is probable more popular as an open source DOS clone).

It's true that they practically killed DR-DOS as a desktop OS to run underneath Windows 9x though. Not sure why, as it was in Digital Research/Novel's best interest to keep it as compatible with Windows as possible, and in any case, the DOS-based line of "Windows" was nearing EOL anyway (in favour of NT-kernel based OSs), so IMNSHO this wasn't a real treat to MS...

Are you sure you want to run this possibly insecure thing?

Posted Oct 29, 2012 9:09 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Microsoft's fight against DR-DOS started from the beginning (when it undercut prices of CP/M-86 and in 1991-1992 (that's when beta versions of Windows 3.1 which refused to run under DR-DOS were released) DRI was quite alive and well. If course the final blow happened in 1995 (do you know that Windows 95 can be run under DR-DOS with a few patches?), but the "final NT solution" only happened in 2001 when XP was released.

Think about it: ten years! More then enough time for the DRI to push GEM as a "GUI of choice". Sure, this humble message was one tiny episode of said fight, but it was quite real fight, not a staged one.