deif writes:
A recent Windows 8 update detects other OS installs as a "security problem", erases non-windows bootloaders and enables UEFI Secure Boot, all without user intervention.
I contacted MS by chat (in Dutch, so of no use to you) and asked them about this. They vehemently denied this was possible at all. Multiple times, in no uncertain terms. Same results were acquired by phone: denial, denial, denial.
I pointed out that it did actually happen, and that it wan't the first time such a thing had happened in the history of MS updates -so "impossible" was BS, to put it shortly.
Then came a chat reply which amounted to "MS updates makes sure W8 functions fine, it does not look at other OS's integrity". This is, in my opinion, a de-facto admission that yes, the update had changed the bootloader back to the W8 version that ignores other OS's, and yes, it had set the UEFI setting back to "secure boot."
Related Stories
Softpedia News reports that version 2.02 of the GRUB boot loader has been released. Among the many new features are support for LZ4 compression on ZFS, 64-bit ext2, XFS v5, Morse code output and a modem-like output through the PC speaker, Xen paravirtualisation, TrueCrypt ISOs, Apple fat binaries on non-Apple hardware, and 16-bit mode on non-x86 hardware.
Further information:
NEWS file
Related stories:
Windows 8 Update Erases Grub, Enables Secure Boot
Press Backspace 28 times: Pwn Unlucky Linux Systems Running GRUB
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:18PM
Honestly, this complaint looks way too sketchy for my tastes, and I don't trust MS one way or the other.
If anything I'd say it sounds like user error, not some big MS plot.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:25PM
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:27PM
Easy enough to verify / disprove. I'm sure we'll see some first hand accounts very soon.
FWIW I can fully believe Microsoft would pull a stunt like this.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:36PM
Yeah, sound very sketchy, everybody knows that no one actually uses windows 8 :P
On a more serious note it's possible that the guy had a rootkit and that the malicious removal tool put it right the only way it knew how.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2014, @12:31AM
Grub & Linux are not rootkits ... and if MRT can enable UEFI Secure Boot it would do so every time it runs on a computer where Secure Boot is disabled.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DECbot on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:39PM
This looks more like MS overlooked the possibility that there could be more than one OS on a Secure Boot machine and removing the foreign bootloader and re-enabling Secure Boot is the correct default option for most pwn'ed Windows machines.
Besides, if you're competent enough to disable Secure Boot and install a second OS, you can probably fix this.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 5, Informative) by cornholed on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:05PM
Does Secure Boot prevent me from dual-booting or running other operating systems on my PC?
No. UEFI's Secure Boot feature prevents the computer from starting unsigned and unauthorized operating systems. This can prevent certain types of malware (e.g., Boot Kits) from starting on your computer. If you want to single- or dual-boot a Windows 8 certified PC with an operating system that does not support Secure Boot (e.g., Windows 7 or Linux), you can disable Secure Boot. For more information about UEFI and its Secure Boot feature, see Protecting the pre-OS environment with UEFI.
In 2008 Obama was not in favor of gay marriage and look what they did to him.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:08PM
I guess I have to agree with you on that. I clicked the link primarily to make a post about - uhhh - help me here, I'm getting senile - ARDA? The code in Windows 3.1 that prevented installation on top of anything other than MSDOS.
When I read your post, I thought for a second or two. Then I scrolled down, and someone mentions that soon there should be lots of complaints on the interwebs complaining of Win8 borking their systems.
So, I did a Google search - and come up pretty much empty handed.
[conspiracy theory[ If this Win8 update is so bad - OH WAIT!!! Microsoft and the NSA are probably collaberating to remove all the complaints faster than they can be posted!!!! [/conspiracy theory]
Ehhhh - As someone else has mentioned, anyone savvy enough to have disabled UEFI, then to install *nix as a dual boot shouldn't be challenged with re-installing Grub.
Personally, if/when I get a UEFI enabled board, I won't be installing Windows on it anyway. I only use Windows in virtual machines, and I haven't even bothered with that for almost a year now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2014, @01:40AM
help me here
AADR (Aaron R. Reynolds) [twimgs.com]
I'm getting senile
This may be the only time this week that you out-senile me. 8-)
-- gewg_
(Score: 4, Informative) by DarkMorph on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:37PM
Now, this was strictly about installing the OS. For an update for the OS, which is already installed, to act this way seems really aggressive which is why I'm sure many are doubting that the claim in TFA is true... Should be easy to verify though - if it's true it should be reproducible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:01AM
Older Windows installers would clobber your MBR silently almost immediately
From what I've seen in forums, this is not just a legacy problem. [google.com]
this was strictly about installing the OS
Yeah, the very first stuff I read about Linux said in bold INSTALL WINDOZE FIRST. [google.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 28 2014, @02:15AM
This has been documented many times.
Page with multiple links. [techrights.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Taibhsear on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:38PM
I'm sure the reddit poster isn't the only person on the planet that speaks Dutch. Perhaps they should post the chat and let other users see the evidence. I wouldn't put it passed Microsoft to do such things but I don't look too kindly on people telling me what information is or isn't of use to me, especially when they're trying to convince me of something.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Drew617 on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:39PM
I'm no fan of MS/Win, but my gut reaction is that this is more likely user error or misunderstanding.
I skimmed the original post on Reddit and don't see much in the way of real information.
Dude's got a working Win8 partition, right? How about a list of patches installed before GRUB was erased? Should be simple enough for a handful of other users to confirm.
(Score: 5, Informative) by michealpwalls on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:27PM
No, this is completely true
Starting out my 2nd semester in college I got a new ASUS laptop (K75DE) with Windows 8 on it. Naturally, the first thing I did was disable Secure Boot, shrink the disk and started to install Gentoo..
Not long afterwards, when booting Windows 8 the Win8 boot loader put "Detecting your PC for errors", or something along those lines. About 15 - 20 seconds later it changed to "Attempting to Repair errors". After 2 minutes, it failed to "repair" the errors and rebooted... What it did was delete every ext3 partition, removed grub and re-enabled SecureBoot.
The only way forward was completely removing Win8 and replacing it with win7. Haven't had a problem since.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:12AM
"Detecting your PC for errors"
This sure does sound like the "unsigned code" thing to me.
I wonder if those folks who *aren't* having problems are running a distro that includes the mjg59 shim. [google.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Marneus68 on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:39PM
> "MS updates makes sure W8 functions fine, it does not look at other OS's integrity". This is, in my opinion, a de-facto admission that yes, the update had changed the bootloader back to the W8 version that ignores other OS's, and yes, it had set the UEFI setting back to "secure boot."
Nice opinion you have there bro. I don't support MS and while I believe they could be something like this, this short reply doesn't look like a "de-facto admission" nor is it a proof of anything. This guy's stuggle with MS tech support doesn't seem to be that much of a news article.
This is nice to see an influx of new articles, but I don't think this is the place to post unverified Reddit threads. What's next ? Posts straight out of 4chan's own technology board ?
(Score: 1) by dyingtolive on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:24PM
4chan may actually be a little more reasonable sometimes.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by c0lo on Wednesday March 26 2014, @04:10PM
I search for "rule 34 +reasonable". Whaddaya know? Lucky me... there's (legal) pr0n [cornell.edu] of it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday March 26 2014, @04:14PM
4chan is there the smart people go to act stupid. Slashdot and Reddit are where the stupid people go to act smart.
4chan is where you're gonna find some of the best damn discussions about certain topics, outside of highly niche IRC and Usenet forums.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @11:06PM
This used to be a lot more true than it is now. Now it's a place for stupid people to go and act smart.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday March 26 2014, @11:32PM
There is a lot of garbage to sort through but yes, there are some very knowledgeable people there. Neckbeard haven.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2014, @05:37PM
4chan has a tech board?
what the heck am i doing here then...
* insert "see u later pwnys" image here *
(Score: 5, Insightful) by melikamp on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:44PM
I gave up on dual-boot (well, on Windoze in general), and on recommending dual-boot to others as a solution to anything. My last experience upgrading Windows went something like this.
I had dual-boot on a desktop, with Windoze and GNU/Linux booting from different drives. I forgot the Windoze version, but I think it was Vista, so back when coreboot was but a twinkle in Micro$oft's eye. I went for a clean install, so I popped the DVD into the drive and directed it to clean and take the whole disk, on which the Windoze was already installed. It silently reformatted my other disk, created a partition there, copied temporary files, and installed. Back then, I did not back up my music, so some 50 GB of hard-to-find records just, puff, disappeared.
Let's face it, Micro$oft has always been treating alternative OSes as evil competition, and deliberately designed (and continues to design) installers and updaters to hose them at every opportunity. These days, when a persons want to run other OSes, I just advise them to use different computers, and phase out Windoze as soon as possible. The hardware is cheap, anyway.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:51PM
Exactly. MS has a long history of trashing other OS installs, and their installer not playing well with others. What do people expect of this company? It's like people keep expecting MS to act like a decent company that cares about its customers, when they have decades of history that shows the exact opposite. Is all of society insane, or are people's brains hardwired to trust others so much that they refuse to believe that this company has only evil intentions, as proven by its actions over its entire existence?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:02PM
It's not true that they don't care about their customers, if you want microsoft to listen to you, just sign up for a premier contract with them and they'll do pretty much whatever you want as long as you're willing to pay for it.
(Score: 2, Funny) by ticho on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:30PM
Wait, why are you describing how hookers work? Offtopic!
(Score: 1) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:37PM
So you're saying that only people who have one of these "premier contracts" are customers?
At best, your comment would imply that in fact, Microsoft cares for _some_ of its customers.
BTW, you make it sound like you actually have one of these contracts that compels them to do "pretty much whatever you want". If so, I'm pretty sure we could come up with a pretty long laundry list of jobs for them, we'd be grateful if you could pass them on. Here's a few off the top of my head:
- Open up UEFI, or scrap it altogether
- Patch the security holes in your crappy OSes, rather than leaving them open for the benefit of NSA/CIA/other criminals.
- Use open standards. Properly.
- Stop threatening companies that use OSS with bullshit patents & license fees.
- Fix the fuck-up you caused at the ISO with their short-sighted bribery.
- Come clean about the Nokia fiasco, and compensate all the employees and shareholders you fucked over.
- Ditto for about a hundred other companies you've raped over the last 20 years.
- Stop spreading FUD about Google. I mean sure, they may not be angels, but they do nothing bad that Microsoft doesn't do 100x worse.
Please let me know when Microsoft have made a start on the above list. :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:51PM
You clearly missed the part where you in addition to having said contract you also have to pay them if you want them to change something. My guess is that the price you'd have to pay to have your list done is more or less exactly the cost of all the shares in the company since you'd practically change the entire way the company operates. The 3 first points on your list could probably be had for a substansially lower price.
Microsoft operates very much like a politician, they don't pay much attention to the masses, but if you give them large sums of money things can be changed to fit your agenda.
(Score: 1) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:56PM
The tone of your message (and of your previous one, assuming you are the same AC) almost sounds like you're defending Microsoft... then you go and liken them to a politician.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @04:17PM
Same AC, I don't really see where I was defending m$, what I was simply stating all along is that if you want microsoft to bend to your will, the only realistic option is to give them money. It's naive to think that any large corporation would implement changes if they didn't make money in the process, all large corporations I've encountered behaves like psychopaths. Personally I think that they will become more and more irrelevant and slowly fade away into oblivion. Once gaming on linux becomes the norm, there will be no incentive for home users to pay for windows either.
(Score: 2) by Jaruzel on Thursday March 27 2014, @01:22PM
Open up UEFI, or scrap it altogether
Erm, UEFI is not a MS technology, other than that they are members of the (pretty wide) forum that supported it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Fi rmware_Interface [wikipedia.org]
Secure Boot is there to help all of us, regardless of OS, it is not an evil plot device created by the Redmond Overlords.
(On-topic: of course, an update auto nuking Grub and enabling Secure Boot without askings is a bit off, but hey it's MS and they feel that there is only one 'supportable configuration' for Windows, and always have done)
-Jar
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:19PM
"booting from different drives"
I also have windows and Debian and some other things booting from different drives... the strategy I use is in an external 5.25 inch bay (where the dvd would go...) you put a $30 or so tray that holds 3.5 inch drives.
You buy about 4 or so trays, stick a drive in each, set them up as windows or BSD or Debian or Ubuntu or WTF and simply swap drives in and out. It would be very hard for windows XP to mess up my Debian install when the debian hard drive is not physically installed inside the machine.
MOST Of the time these tray things are sold to wanna-be desktop RAID people so one interesting strategy is to mechanically install 3 trays but only one gets electrical power and SATA, the other two are just protected storage of drives. A wall shelf works well. The trays don't protect the drives very well from a fall.
I have a basement fileserver with mirroring RAID set up with trays and it makes offsite backups VERY easy because a rotating 1 of 3 drives in the mirror spends its life in the safe deposit box at the bank. Over the years of course the time to reform an array has increased from "hours" to "days" so how long this is viable is a question as soon we'll have 10 TB drives that take a month to mirror, so a monthly rotation might not work so well. Actual long term drive bandwidth has not nearly increased as fast as storage capacity.
I also find trays make periodic storage upgrades painless. No need to unplug everything and move the machine and take all the screws out of the chassis and reroute cables temporarily blah blah just yank the drive, swap the tray, insert the drive, done.
I'm told they'll be unreliable. I've been doing this since mid PATA IDE era in the 90s and no problems yet. I'd advise not dropping the trays, not using a hammer to shove them into place, whatever.
I originally got the idea from my time in .mil where drives were yanked out of desktops and gently placed (LOL) into safe to semi-secure the systems. I would imagine now-a-days they don't store sensitive stuff locally so it doesn't matter, or they shove entire laptops/tablets into the safe. Or just work in a building where the facility itself is of a certain security level (no ground floor windows, never unmanned or unguarded, etc). Secure is of course relative, lock up a hard drive all you want, that's not going to stop someone installing a hardware keysniffer. This is from observation of operations, not from being a .mil security guy...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:19AM
external 5.25 inch bay[...]swap drives in and out
Better idea: Never run Windoze on bare metal. If you *must* run Windoze, do that in a virtual machine.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2014, @05:14AM
What if you need the superior drivers, superior 3D acceleration, low latency and glitch-free sound? A VM does not give you that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2014, @08:50PM
superior drivers, superior 3D acceleration
Simple solution: Stop handing over your cash for junky hardware whose lazy/incompetent manufacturer doesn't properly support every OS that you run.
low latency and glitch-free sound
The software isn't the problem; the problem is your parsimonious nature--and your overblown expectations for legacy gear.
(As noted previously, you're quite the spendthrift when it comes to poorly-supported peripherals.)
It's time to get something with more oomph than your Pentium 4.
Try something built in the last 6 years.
Dedicating a core to the VM will cure what ails you.
-- gewg_
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:47PM
Leeching Reddit for news
http://xkcd.com/1022/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by BradTheGeek on Wednesday March 26 2014, @04:09PM
Other than some disgruntled rumor, is there hard evidence that this is happening? Pointing to a specific patch/update?
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday March 26 2014, @04:38PM
I finally found out what was causing my windows7 system (which I use for media play; stupid amazon prime forces me to use windows to stream videos, grrr!) to reboot on its own. for the longest time I thought my system was not stable or had hardware problems. some days I would wake up and not see the folders as I left them on the desktop but a login window!
well, I was up at 3am last nite watching some video when the MS updater started a count down and did allow me to defer the reboot for another 4 hours (thanks... I guess) but if you were not there to say 'no', it would reboot your system. how rude!! I turn off auto-updates and I turn off most things in win7 that would annoy a user, but this just goes too far! its enough to make me want to turn off ALL update ability. I really hate forced reboots and ones that auto-reboot on you at night without your say-so is as rude as can be!!
does anyone know any way to stop this? I think I did disable all auto-style settings but maybe there are reg hacks for this?
at any rate, I could believe that win8 also wants to clobber mbr's. if MS thinks its ok to reboot a live running system without the user allowing it, sure, I could see them stepping on other os's and not CARING one bit about it.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:23PM
That thing runs all kinds of stuff when it thinks you're not using your computer.
You gotta remove all those tasks and that crap goes away. Everything from actually useful to you. To calling home to microsoft.
Or just disable task scheduler in the registry.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by DECbot on Wednesday March 26 2014, @08:48PM
I manage to watch Amazon Prime videos just fine with Xbuntu and chromenium. I've even trained my wife and 4-year-old daughter to use it. Netflixs and silverlight was the last thing that I recall not playing on Linux, but that might have change since Google released chrome/chromenium.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @10:24PM
Are you sure you have auto-updates off? Specifically Windows Update.
(Score: 2, Informative) by lajos on Wednesday March 26 2014, @05:05PM
Last week I got a auto update from MS on win8. When I restarted, the upgrade got stuck at 12%.
After waiting for a an hour and resetting a couple times I got to the rescue screen, where i tried all things including reverting to a snapshot. Everything failed. Could not get back to win8.
Called windows tech support and without hesitation the dude says I needed to wipe and reinstall win8. I was shocked. I told him I was willing to go through the secret methods of reverting from the stuck upgrade. He said there was no secret methods. I have to reinstall.
I told him this was not my facebook status update computer, but it's my work pc and need it back. Still, the only option he said, was to reinstall.
So I did. Then I got the same update and got stuck at 12%.
Reinstalled again and disabled windows updates and windows driver updates. Fuck MS and auto updates.
(Score: 2) by pixeldyne on Wednesday March 26 2014, @09:45PM
I was fed up with my work laptop so I've used a tool to convert the disk to a vm image, installed linux and am now running windows in a vm. Whenever it breaks down I can still use the host system (webmail for example) and use the snapshot functionality to recover when it's badly broken. I don't believe windows will ever leave the beta stage.
I like the idea of uefi secure boot, I wanted it on a new desktop pc but couldn't get it to work with win 8.1.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday March 26 2014, @11:02PM
After waiting for a an hour and resetting a couple times I got to the rescue screen, where i tried all things including reverting to a snapshot. Everything failed. Could not get back to win8.
Wow, did you have to pay for this feature, or was it a free improvement?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zeigerpuppy on Wednesday March 26 2014, @09:52PM
Different OSs not playing nice with each other has always been the rule, not the exception.
In my practice of the Xen of Tripple Booting (or even hexabooting on occasion), I have learnt the golden rule:
Install the stupidest operating system first (and don't run update or repair tools until they are vetted by the community).
So, it's usually Win7 first, then OSX, then Linux.
However, you need to be second Dan to mix the GPT with the MBR and avoid spontaneous combustion.
It makes me miss AmigaOS, partition management was so much saner.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:40AM
Install the stupidest operating system first
+1. Now, how do we get this knowledge out to **everyone**?
More specifically, how do we get the unwashed masses to recognize that the OS that has traditionally come pre-installed on the most machines is actually the most fragile and clumsy?
I mean, sure, they know that Redmond's OS blue-screens, locks up, gets infected at the drop of a hat, needs reboots for absolutely no reason, needs defragging often...
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Interesting) by youngatheart on Thursday March 27 2014, @03:33AM
Then set Windows boot manager with BCDEdit to boot your Linux [phantomcode.com] system.
YMMV - use your own partitions and desired file names as appropriate. This is left as an exercise to the reader.