Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

zapper · 2021-07-13 06:46:10

blackhole wrote:

BLOBs are not the same as device firmware. The latter is part of most devices, either residing the device's NVRAM or as a firmware image which is loaded via the device driver/firmware loader.
Far from being unnecessary, they are actually the device's own OS. In that they are code which runs on the device itself and not any kind of x86 OS binary.
Some firmware is "open source", some is proprietary. Despite contributing driver code the Linux graphics stack, Intel and AMD graphics tech is every bit as proprietary as Nvidia - with closed source firmware and hardware. They won't release code which could threaten their commercial interests.
Camtaf, you're correct in that modern CPU's actually use a firmware layer called microcode, which runs on the "hardwired" CPU. Microcode makes it possible, well most of time, for the vendor to "patch" the CPU. There are also "out of band" processors running on modern CPU's, running a small OS - e.g. the Intel Management Engine.
The IME has been deliberately designed to prevent the end user disabling it. Along with UEFI and Secureboot, all of this tech equates to less freedom, privacy and security for end users.
As headstick has said, raspberry pi and its Broadcom chips, is no escape - neither is in fact ARM, if/when Nvidia buy them out.
The raspberry pi people already made their intentions plain in the PR disaster regarding the vscode Microsoft repository. But if you're already in bed with Broadcom, signed NDAs and developing devices loaded with proprietary firmware, courting Microsoft is not such a big deal.

I think you misunderstood my position, anything non-free including firmware that has potential insecurities, or backdoors, is a blob to me. You are thinking of OpenBSD's thinking on blobs, but that isn't the FSF/GNU or even my belief.

Also, their commerical interests are bullshit. I know they couldn't care less, but I in fact do care, thus I will never use anything with an intel me equivelant enabled at all, as long as I can.

I say their commercial interests are bs, though, because the way they accomplish their goals is just... phenomenally messed up.

Its not the fact that the hardware isn't open source that is the ONLY problem, its actually the fact that it is laden with pointless DRM that requires non-free firmware to run, for, things like wifi, graphics and sound even...

I knew microsoft, apple, google were bad, but I didn't know raspberrypi people were bad also...

smh...

But nope, alas... that will probably never happen for most mainstream hardware. Greed/Power is just too enticing for many of these big corporations.

I guess to end this thought, all hardware should have optionally free licenses. Trademarks of course are a different matter as long as they don't go the road of mozilla, but yeah...

Anyways, rant done...

Last edited by zapper (2021-07-13 06:46:54)

blackhole · 2021-07-13 17:15:31

No not OpenBSD's thinking, the actual definition which goes back more than a few decades:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_large_object

I don't place much faith in belief systems surrounding GNU/FSF. Device firmware is just a fact of life - some implementations are acceptable others are bad, some more are utter crap. But unless you have the money and resources to develop your own hardware, we're stuck with x86. I think that situation is positively win, win for Microsoft. Linux and 'BSD users stranded on old hardware, while it continues this latest "embrace" phase.

While we're talking "beliefs" I have the firm conviction that the new Microsoft is far more dangerous to free software than the old.

MS have been working on WSL/WSL2, Azure, etc for many years. All of those products are about /not/ running a Linux OS on bare metal but on proprietary software owned ad controlled by Microsoft. Its takeover of the github platform and other acquisitions are all part of the same strategy.

Hardware is "intellectual property". To maintain a competitive advantage there are "trade secrets". The hardware you use was developed by corporations who seek to profit from it

The MIT license would not stop e.g. Intel from taking Nvidia's code, which they have spent billions and decades of research on, and just incorporating it in their own products - decreasing Nvidia's advantage in that market and share value. tl;dr - they won't do that.

zapper · 2021-07-14 02:14:31

blackhole wrote:

No not OpenBSD's thinking, the actual definition which goes back more than a few decades:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_large_object
I don't place much faith in belief systems surrounding GNU/FSF. Device firmware is just a fact of life - some implementations are acceptable others are bad, some more are utter crap. But unless you have the money and resources to develop your own hardware, we're stuck with x86. I think that situation is positively win, win for Microsoft. Linux and 'BSD users stranded on old hardware, while it continues this latest "embrace" phase.
While we're talking "beliefs" I have the firm conviction that the new Microsoft is far more dangerous to free software than the old.
MS have been working on WSL/WSL2, Azure, etc for many years. All of those products are about /not/ running a Linux OS on bare metal but on proprietary software owned ad controlled by Microsoft. Its takeover of the github platform and other acquisitions are all part of the same strategy.
Hardware is "intellectual property". To maintain a competitive advantage there are "trade secrets". The hardware you use was developed by corporations who seek to profit from it
"All rights reserved" refers to copyright - it has nothing to do with software licensing.
The MIT license would not stop e.g. Intel from taking Nvidia's code, which they have spent billions and decades of research on, and just incorporating it in their own products - decreasing Nvidia's advantage in that market and share value. tl;dr - they won't do that.

Because it allows DRM galore to be put into stuff, and making a patch to remove it, requires heavy reverse engineering under such tough conditions, that its nearly impossible to do what is needed to be done.

FSF/GNU you are however right about, although I say this, because they don't go nearly far enough on actual freedom issues, like systemd, dbus, networkmanager, pulseaudio, pipewire, etc...

aka, some software that is being developed by people for linux, is meant to break freedom and force adoption by breaking backwards compatibility. FSF/GNU doesn't seem to understand this is a huge threat.

As for x86, I think you are very wrong about the future, I think Risc-V will one day be the main however, there is one question, that remains unknown, how much of it will be, non blobbed Risc-V implementations... again, the actual definition, including non-free firmware.

But yeah, non-free firmware being a fact of life is total hogwash.

It is unreasonable for corporations to have such unjust power to be allowed to put backdoors in all their software...

Anyways, that's my final thought. so... yeah.

Tatwi · 2021-07-14 02:38:18

What bothers me is thus...

- I own a boxed copy of Windows 7.
- All of my desktop hardware has drivers for Windows 7.
- There's no problem running an old OS on a system that isn't on a network.
- I can install Windows 7 on my system without a problem.
- I can't install the GPU drivers, because they require updates that Microsoft no longer offers for download.

So, here I have a piece of software that I paid for which I can no longer use in its entirety, because the company who sold it to me removed access to some of its updates/patches/etc and no one else is authorized to provide those missing components.

Microsoft doesn't care what we want to do with our computers. They don't care that we paid for them and that they belong to us. They don't care if we have valid reasons to use older machines. In short,

Microsoft doesn't care.

For what it's worth, my lowly AMD FX-8320 based desktop is still a speedy super computer for me, from compiling with GCC in Linux to playing games in Windows 10. I can't justify spending the money to upgrade it just so it can do all the same stuff, but faster... and with Secure Boot / TPM.

It is a bummer that it will become harder to find hardware that doesn't come with all this new crud. Hard to say how much that will matter, but "very little" is my feeling, should this plateau of computing continue on through the 2030s (I mean really, other than "faster and with higher detail" and the smartphone form factor, fuck all has changed in computing since 2001).

Camtaf · 2021-07-14 08:59:57

I think, if I remember right, you have only bought the right to use MS Windows, a kind of lease, you don't own it outright - which was another reason for using Linux for me.

I would prefer to use totally open software & hardware, but it won't happen, because companies spend billions to bring new products to market, to stay ahead of their competitors.

zapper · 2021-07-16 03:16:19

Camtaf wrote:

I think, if I remember right, you have only bought the right to use MS Windows, a kind of lease, you don't own it outright - which was another reason for using Linux for me.
I would prefer to use totally open software & hardware, but it won't happen, because companies spend billions to bring new products to market, to stay ahead of their competitors.

Indeed, I wish all hardware had to be mandatorily be under free licenses only. Aka, fully open source ones. Whether permissive or copyleft.

That being said, I doubt that will come for a while if ever. And if it does happen, it will take a huge situation and possibly 500+ years to happen.

Basically, not in our future probably...

blackhole · 2021-07-16 07:14:51

While I admire your ideals zapper, I think you may underestimate the power of money and "Big Tech" in particular. While RISC-V certainly has a lot going for it, as with Raspberry Pi and indeed Linux, it's a relative unknown and if it were ever to become a threat to Microsoft's or Intel's or AMD's or .... market share, it would be snuffed out. Linux in particular, never became a threat to the Windows desktop, that was perceived by some in the early 2000s.

There is also the argument that open hardware would stifle innovation. If you develop something for profit, and a competitive edge but then are not allowed to keep that as a trade secret, then why bother? I would say it's feasible, but would require a radical rethink on patents, licensing and how hardware vendors do business. As you say "not in our future".

At this moment in time, it looks like it will get a lot worse before it can get any better.

The root of of this evil is unfettered, bottomless greed and a super rich elite controlling 99% of the worlds wealth. Solve that and we can talk about details such as open hardware .

steve_v · 2021-07-16 11:31:36

zapper wrote:

some software that is being developed by people for linux, is meant to break freedom and force adoption by breaking backwards compatibility. FSF/GNU doesn't seem to understand this is a huge threat

Of course it is. Just follow the money-trail, and you'll find the usual suspects with the usual motivations.
As for the FSF, it's kind of outside their mandate... And personally I don't think they have the balls for it.
Maybe we'll see a bigger, meaner brother to the anti-tivoization clause in the GPL one day, but I suspect such would be too much of a threat-to-revenue (again, the usual suspects are funding many projects) for anyone to actually use it. Even Linus rejected GPL3 over that one.

blackhole wrote:

While we're talking "beliefs" I have the firm conviction that the new Microsoft is far more dangerous to free software than the old.

Ahh, so somebody else sees this for what it is. Woot.
Here I was thinking I was the only one with a feeling of creeping dread over the whole "Micro$oft/Google/Oracle etc. etc. loves Linux" thing... It smelled oh-so-fishy from day one, and IME leopards don't often change their spots so radically, least of all when there's fresh meat to be had.

Microsoft is Microsoft, and they're still in it for the money, nothing else. If making the last wild GNU bend over and get their kernel image signed waters the money-tree, that's what they'll do. Who's gonna stop them?

What irks me most is the number of people I know (some of them skilled and well-paid devs) who think WSL and all it's accompanying "embrace" bollocks is pure awesome sauce.
So many people drinking the convenience koolaid, and nobody asks why it's there in the first place. Dude, it's bait

blackhole wrote:

The root of of this evil is unfettered, bottomless greed and a super rich elite controlling 99% of the worlds wealth. Solve that and we can talk about details such as open hardware .

Yeah, that and 99% of the worlds other problems too.

I'm not anti-capitalist mind, but this has gone far too far for far too long, and the rot is deep. Personally I expect it'd take an apocalypse-level event (or that mass-uprising that'll never happen because everyone is so damn apathetic) to change it, at least in the "developed" world.
Hey, who knows, maybe this apocalypse-level anthropomorphic climate change thing we seem so hell bent on courting will do the trick?

I'm kinda blowing some of the dust off my old-tech low-level x86 foo at the moment, maybe It'll even come to hacking my BIOS and burning 'proms again to get around ~~secure~~ broken boot. That'd be proper full-circle that would.

Last edited by steve_v (2021-07-16 11:37:20)

zapper · 2021-07-18 05:42:33

Secure boot is a misnomer, I prefer hazardous boot personally.

Yes, the microsoft loves linux thing is yet another deception that should have been obvious to most people, even linus torvaldo should see through the bs.

Also, yes capitalism is a poison, clarifying to say out of balance. Denialism is also a problem, which seems to prevent people from dealing with issues, including climate change.

I roll my eyes at all the people who think capitalism is awesome and pure and perfect...

No balance, no hope.

Aka, no system by itself works, including capitalism...

Last edited by zapper (2021-07-18 05:43:20)

blackhole · 2021-07-18 11:49:59

UEFI is the Trojan Horse, Secureboot is the Trojan inside, the "payload" if you will. If I can boot my chosen OS using CSM, and it boots normally then I am not convinced of the benefits of UEFI. UEFI features such as GPT, are possible with a PMBR. So if an OS does not support GPT with a legacy BIOS, that's a business decision they are making, not a technical one. If you search the web for the advantages of UEFI, you will find a lot of hot air about a GUI using a mouse and of course "security". That latter claim is insane, as UEFI increases attack surfaces and introduces vectors which weren't there in legacy BIOS. For example: remote management / networked capability....

steve_v · 2021-07-18 13:41:18

blackhole wrote:

If you search the web for the advantages of UEFI, you will find a lot of hot air about a GUI using a mouse and of course "security". That latter claim is insane.

...And so is the former. Using a mouse in BIOS setup is a nightmare, and the very first thing I look for is an "advanced" or "classic" mode that is navigable with the keyboard.

blackhole wrote:

UEFI increases attack surfaces and introduces vectors which weren't there in legacy BIOS. For example: remote management / networked capability....

Don't forget auto-reinstalling the horrific ad-filled motherboard manufacturers shovelware. ASUS "Armoury Crate" springs to mind there, that thing is pretty much the modern take on a boot-sector virus.

chris2be8 · 2021-07-18 16:40:36

zapper wrote:

Secure boot is a misnomer, I prefer hazardous boot personally.
Yes, the microsoft loves linux thing is yet another deception that should have been obvious to most people, even linus torvaldo should see through the bs.
Also, yes capitalism is a poison, clarifying to say out of balance. Denialism is also a problem, which seems to prevent people from dealing with issues, including climate change.
I roll my eyes at all the people who think capitalism is awesome and pure and perfect...
No balance, no hope.
Aka, no system by itself works, including capitalism...

The problem here is that microsoft is an effective monopoly. Capitalism works well if you have a choice of product to buy, eg cars. But most people have to buy the OS with most software written for it, and most software is written for the OS with most users. So just because microsoft got there first they won control of the desktop. Ditto Intel nearly control the hardware market, though AMD do provide some competition.

WSL is intended to help them keep control by allowing people who need software only available on Linux to stay on windoze.

Nothing but US government intervention could break microsoft's monopoly (eg by requiring that the source code for any OS be made publicly available). And don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

It's a similar story with facebook (most people use it because most of their friends use it). And google etc.

Chris

zapper · 2021-07-18 20:13:27

chris2be8 wrote:

zapper wrote:
Secure boot is a misnomer, I prefer hazardous boot personally.
Yes, the microsoft loves linux thing is yet another deception that should have been obvious to most people, even linus torvaldo should see through the bs.
Also, yes capitalism is a poison, clarifying to say out of balance. Denialism is also a problem, which seems to prevent people from dealing with issues, including climate change.
I roll my eyes at all the people who think capitalism is awesome and pure and perfect...
No balance, no hope.
Aka, no system by itself works, including capitalism...
The problem here is that microsoft is an effective monopoly. Capitalism works well if you have a choice of product to buy, eg cars. But most people have to buy the OS with most software written for it, and most software is written for the OS with most users. So just because microsoft got there first they won control of the desktop. Ditto Intel nearly control the hardware market, though AMD do provide some competition.
WSL is intended to help them keep control by allowing people who need software only available on Linux to stay on windoze.
Nothing but US government intervention could break microsoft's monopoly (eg by requiring that the source code for any OS be made publicly available). And don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
It's a similar story with facebook (most people use it because most of their friends use it). And google etc.
Chris

My point was that we need a blend of ideas from different government types to make a good government.

Capitalism seems like a good idea by itself, until you consider that businesses will do whatever makes them the most money and gives them the most control.

But I agree with your post, about WSL's purpose, as well as the one about facebook.

As for the government intervention thing,

I think that could backfire anyways due to the % of the population that is good at manipulating things, aka manipulating people. They would probably try to get people fired up to reverse it to the opposite end, aka, everything is proprietary... which would be very frightening to have happen.

Although, I think there are a few problems: problem 1: is you cannot modify your own Hardware, to remove the evil restrictions such as hazardous boot which some call, secure boot. Though that is not an accurate description, quite the opposite... and other bios issues too.
Problem 2: you should be able to change the bios to your liking without worrying about all rights reserved copyright evil and people being allowed to arrest you for doing such. Even if they don't give you the specs, you should be able to study them to change it and not need to do some insane reverse engineering effort just to fix the problems they created and without anyone being able to retaliate against you/sue/have you arrested.

There might be a problem 3, but I think these two cover it nicely.
So yeah...

Last edited by zapper (2021-07-18 20:16:05)

sgage · 2021-07-19 00:53:16

Capitalism, and indeed Democracy, only "work" with an informed and educated populace. At least here in the US, we have neither. Capitalism in the US has become an abusive mind control system. Democracy has become a joke. Not a funny joke.

samhain · 2021-07-19 11:40:56

Not any difference in EU. Education system is transformed to create consume drones.

Microsoft doesn't care.

I think they care a lot. It's just they care for the wrong reason.

zapper · 2021-07-19 12:10:25

samhain wrote:

Not any difference in EU. Education system is transformed to create consume drones.
Microsoft doesn't care.
I think they care a lot. It's just they care for the wrong reason.

Okay, then in that case, they care, the same way google and apple care about privacy.

Which is to say, they want to be able to spy on people.

;(

Smh to that...

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#26 2021-07-13 06:46:10

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#27 2021-07-13 17:15:31

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#28 2021-07-14 02:14:31

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#29 2021-07-14 02:38:18

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#30 2021-07-14 08:59:57

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#31 2021-07-16 03:16:19

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#32 2021-07-16 07:14:51

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#33 2021-07-16 11:31:36

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#34 2021-07-18 05:42:33

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#35 2021-07-18 11:49:59

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#36 2021-07-18 13:41:18

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#37 2021-07-18 16:40:36

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#38 2021-07-18 20:13:27

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#39 2021-07-19 00:53:16

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#40 2021-07-19 11:40:56

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

#41 2021-07-19 12:10:25

Re: Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot

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