[OT] the evils (?) of secure boot.

Peter Alcibiades palcibiades-first at yahoo.co.uk
Tue Nov 27 03:22:13 EST 2012


In some cases you really have to be able to boot from other media.  For
instance, when cloning a hard drive, which you might do for backups, but you
will also have to do in the course of forensic examination of a machine so
as to leave the evidence untouched.  Or you may need to do serious file
system repair.

This is a much underrated social issue.  We have taken for granted for the
last 10-20 years a world in which we could do what we wanted with our
machines.  We are moving into a world in which various players want to
control what can be installed or accessed.  

It comes up in a variety of contexts.  You have Apple trying to prevent
people installing OSX on other hardware.  Then you have the desire to
prevent anyone doing bad things with their iPhones, which would include
installing the wrong applications.  Then you have the desire to prevent
people using an app because it gives access to the wrong content, which
included the Kama Sutra and some political cartoons.  The desire to control
what mapping applications are used on the tablets.

In the case of Kindle and the Nook you have a desire to prevent or at least
inconvenience the use of other stores to buy books.

In the case of secure boot, one way to look at it is that MS wants to own
the hardware on which its OS has been installed.

Anyone who cares about intellectual freedom in the digital age needs to
think whether they can spend a little time to educate and lobby their
competition regulators about these issues.  We do need some more security on
bios and booting.  But we need the buyer and user to have control, not MS or
Apple.  Linux is the canary in the coal mine here.



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