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Volume 189 of The PCLinuxOS Magazine has an article on Bill Gates' evil prophecy from 40 years ago where he aims for ending general-purpose computing. He achieves that goal a step at a time over the decades, with the help of many a mole and quisling. Lately, the Pluton chip and Restricted Boot play both play key roles towards ending this era of general-purpose computing. The Pluton chip is an extension of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) used by Vista10 and required by Vista11. Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, and even its upstream source, Debian, folded years ago in regards to secure boot by using Microsoft's signing key, possibly cementing that as the norm. The article covers that and many other incidents leading up to the current situation.
There is an ever-decreasing amount of time left to keep general-purpose computing alive and the author signs off with how to approach the political maneuvers going on:
The implications are already starting to show
At the beginning of the year, Matthew Garrett, the researcher who created the UEFI bootloader for Linux (which I do not agree with at all, as it sets a precedent for Microsoft to abuse the market, with its position of power, should not be allowed under any circumstances) said that the Pluton chip was not an attack on users' freedom to use whatever operating system they wanted, which was not a threat.
In July 2022, he recanted, when he was unable to install Linux on a high-end Thinkpad Z13, complaining that this was not a legal practice by Lenovo.
But, that's what Microsoft wants. Under the guise of enforcing security, it blocks the machine's access to the user himself, being the gatekeeper of personal computing. In other words, "my" microcomputer is over. From now on, it will be Microsoft's microcomputer, and only what it allows will run...[sic]
It is up to us, the users, to boycott AMD products that contain the Pluton chip, to favor recycled or refurbished computers. And there is still more to do:
- Support the Free Software Foundation's campaigns against Windows 11
- Support the Right to Repair movement, in the person of Louis Rossman, one of the most prominent activists of this movement
- Bomb your congressmen with emails & phone calls, so that Microsoft is legally pressured not to go ahead with the Pluton project.
So folks, things have never been so in jeopardy as they are today. Microsoft wants to be the big brother, and dictate what everyone can run on their computers, under the benevolent guise of ensuring security. We can't afford that, or the future of personal computing and privacy will be ruined.
Finally, let's not forget that anyone who says they don't need privacy because they have nothing to hide is the same thing as not defending freedom of speech, because they have nothing to say...[sic]
Let's fight this! The scenario is ugly, and the battle will be hard!
However, procrastination by using only old or refurbished computers does nothing to address the cause of the problem. There is a finite supply of old equipment, anyway, and eventually they will run out. If there are no new general-purpose laptops, desktops, and servers in the pipeline by then the era of useful computing will have drawn to a close.
Previously:
(2022) Responsible Stewardship of the UEFI Secure Boot Ecosystem
(2020) Red Hat and CentOS Systems Aren't Booting Due to BootHole Patches
(2018) First-ever UEFI Rootkit Spotted in the Wild
(2014) Rootkits Target 64-bit PCs - Secure Boot Is Not Always Secure
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by HammeredGlass on Sunday October 09 2022, @07:01PM (11 children)
on another note, I am fucking around with zip files on unbuntu right now that can't handle the fact that some compression tools place a zero or one in some field that designates whether or not nix flavors of decompression tools simply can't cuz too hard
even the built in file management software on my synology nas is totally bootfukced in the ear over this little thing which windows flavor of compression/decompression tools adapts to and doesn't make me read 10 year old forum posts showing that this problem is well known to everybody, bUt ThE siMPLe Fix is to SIMPLY edit the code using a hex editor???? NO!!! FUCK YOU nix world!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by HammeredGlass on Sunday October 09 2022, @07:11PM
btw, he knew nix people would enable and empower him to do this to a world that is sick and tired of the CLI and never want to see it ever again, and that it would be easy to run roughshod over people who saw windows works(who cares about security for my candy crush machine), and 'please review the man pages and open this readme.md that wont display correctly in 4 out of the 5 text viewer applications you've already installed while begging some codemonkey to not suggest opening the CLI and typing just a few dozen characters of nonsense using name that were arbitrarily assigned to the tool by some caffeine stunted goober at 4am to hopefully not have to additionally install a few dependencies that you have to compile yourself on your mainstream flavor of nix that allegedly works right out of the box(as long as all you want to do is change your desktop background and stare at it wondering why it is appears the bastard child of more than two OSes that have entirely different workflows)to finally be confronted with some message in the black void which states that there is a library which is unavailable for your current version of nix 5.0.1.04.1.a , but if you want to clean install a fresh copy of nix 5.0.1.04.1, then it may work, but no promises.
I don't care if nix is running all the servers and all the phones and every POS register in the world if you abandon the general computing world that Bill knew he could steal from us cuz some of you freaks want to feel ubermensch by using that godddamm terminal for everything
remember the PC? nah, you don't and that's why Bill won
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Sjolfr on Sunday October 09 2022, @07:13PM (7 children)
I've been doing this for 30+ years. Compression is always software specific. I recall some small problems of decompression 20 years ago but, today, I find that hard to believe. There are multitudes of decompression programs out there for all platforms.
Perhaps you're doing something wrong?
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by HammeredGlass on Sunday October 09 2022, @07:20PM (6 children)
nah, fuck that.
i used 7zip on windows for years(decades?) to open everything i came across on the web and now here i am using a 2022 release of unbuntu and it can't handle a zip file created by a standard corp program for general consumption and usage?
nah, fuck that.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Sjolfr on Sunday October 09 2022, @08:13PM (3 children)
Be more specific. How did you zip the file(s) exactly? What options and so on. What are you using to unzip them? Ubuntu has a few programs that can be used for that, including 7zip. Are you expecting that your filemanager handle the zip/unzip process for you? Are you using command line?
7zip archives seem to work just fine under ubuntu using 7z e
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by HammeredGlass on Sunday October 09 2022, @08:26PM (2 children)
reliving my nix experiences is akin to redoing any ptsd cause
(Score: 5, Touché) by Sjolfr on Sunday October 09 2022, @08:33PM (1 child)
Now the drama badge belongs to you.
(Score: 2) by HammeredGlass on Monday October 10 2022, @02:28PM
the scars of nix earned it for me
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Sunday October 09 2022, @11:03PM (1 child)
You know there's only one N in "Ubuntu", right?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Redundant) by HammeredGlass on Monday October 10 2022, @07:25PM
Is there?
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday October 09 2022, @08:43PM (1 child)
Use 7zip. Run it in wine if you're too lazy to figure out p7zip.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by HammeredGlass on Monday October 10 2022, @02:25PM
"too lazy to figure out"
never change, nix