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At its WinHEC hardware conference in Shenzhen, China, Microsoft talked about the hardware requirements for Windows 10. The precise final specs are not available yet, so all this is somewhat subject to change, but right now, Microsoft says that the switch to allow Secure Boot to be turned off is now optional. Hardware can be Designed for Windows 10 and can offer no way to opt out of the Secure Boot lock down.
The presentation is silent on whether OEMs can or should provide support for adding custom certificates.
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Windows 10 May Make the Secure Boot Lock Out a Reality for Alternate OSs
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Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
-- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday May 30 2015, @03:56AM
I checked before posting and now this is a bit redundant because someone else basically said the same [soylentnews.org] but even so...
I'm not too worried about Microsoft, it might even be a really good thing adding to the drive towards Free as in Freedom hardware. Let the people using Windows be tied to specific hardware much the same as those who use Apple or iOS or Android are.
I haven't gotten around to buying and trying any Raspberry Pi's yet (or any clone or competitor) but I can make comparisons between an old, dusty, unused, and very average non-gaming 1998 or so desktop box and the Pi 2 B beats than one by several multiples in every regard except size (the Pi 2 is smaller in volume by almost precisely a factor of 512(!!)). I know they're not completely 100% Free (nor is any of the competition) but I doubt they or the Single Board Computers like them will be locked any time soon.
In the absolutely worst case I could live contently (and likely much more productively :3 ) with nothing but a *nix/BSD terminal. RetroBSD [retrobsd.org] and/or LiteBSD [retrobsd.org] can do that (and likely much more) on very small MIPS hardware (some of those even come with small screens). FreeBSD also supports very small MIPS stuff.
But what I'm really waiting for is lowRISC [lowrisc.org] :)
Microsoft isn't anywhere close to where the interesting stuff is happening like this new Finnish guy [helsinki.fi] that's getting his fingers dirty (also together with the username Thoth and some others in various comment fields over at Bruce Schneier's blog [schneier.com]).
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 30 2015, @07:56AM
In what way is oottelas work related to motherboard bootloader lockdown?
He sure writes interesting things. But that doesn't make relevant.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday May 30 2015, @02:55PM
Only meant as an example of interesting things going on out there which are as far away from Microsoft (and thus also their bootloader lockdowns) as possible.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Saturday May 30 2015, @08:00AM
Raspberry Pi and others are really nice computing platforms. But they don't beat a 4 GHz multicore multimegabyte cache setup with terrazillions of fast I/O. So motherboard lockdown is a problem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday May 30 2015, @03:06PM
Microsoft isn't exactly a king of (or arguably even a noticeable competitor in) either the “serious server” market nor high end computing nor massively parallel computing, if they attempt a lockdown of such boards they'll be laughed at and ignored.
Any lockdown would almost exclusively hit the consumer and SOHO and “corporate thick client” markets (tablets, notebooks, laptops, desktops, workstations, relatively small servers).
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 30 2015, @04:53PM
Guess geeks will start using servers ar private workstations..
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday May 30 2015, @10:00PM
Yeah that too.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 01 2015, @01:50PM
We don't already? Imagine that - I'm ahead of the trend with my Opteron!
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 01 2015, @10:42PM
Think 19" rack, dual PSU, lot's of blinken lights etc. ;-)