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I've gotten tired of the Secure Boot madness, especially lately with Microsoft's memo to OEMs that they are no longer required to provide an opt-out.
I've written the FTC. Here is the letter I sent to the antitrust division as per their instructions:
Hello, I'm writing to report a possible violation by Microsoft Corporation, who has been abusing their standing with PC manufacturers (who need to comply to get the "Designed for Windows" sticker) to bully them into making it increasingly difficult to install a competitor's operating system on a standard PC.
Around 2011, Microsoft mandated that machines that ship with Windows 8 come with a feature called "Secure Boot" enabled. What this does, is on boot, it checks to see if the operating system was digitally "signed" by a trusted authority, in most cases Microsoft alone, and if not, the system completely refuses to boot. While until Windows 10, Microsoft mandated a feature to disable secure boot in the BIOS, with Windows 10 they have told manufacturers that this is no longer required.
What's important to understand is, that Microsoft has literally positioned themselves as virtually the only trusted 'signer' of all competitors' operating systems. All competitors must either hope that the PC will provide a method to disable this 'secure boot', or *pay* Microsoft, a competitor, to graciously allow them to run on standard PCs.
Prior to the secure boot feature, it was extremely easy to load any competitor's operating system on a standard PC. It took no workarounds or 'hacking' or fiddling with settings. It would simply install.
There are many different operating systems available for the PC, including but not by any means limited to:
Linux (which comes in literally thousands of variations, each requiring to be signed by Microsoft for secure boot), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Haiku OS, Solaris, and even Android.These systems have no technical limitation preventing them from being installed on these PCs, but rather
are now artificially forced to pay Microsoft to run on any PC with Secure Boot 'locked' on.
I have already encountered a Toshiba laptop that did not have an option to disable secure boot, and it was impossible to boot my preferred homemade Linux operating system on it as a result, since I cannot and will not pay Microsoft to sign it.Microsoft has made unusually high requirements for them signing an operating system. It even goes as far to state that components they sign must not be of particular free software licenses.
In addition, it contains a threat to revoke certificates for OSes that have known security holes in the boot sequence code, an action Microsoft would surely never do to their own OS. (Windows)Here is a link to their policies regarding UEFI/Secure Boot "signing":
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windows_hardware_certification/archive/2013/12/03/microsoft-uefi-ca-signing-policy-updates.aspxI await a response and hope that we can continue to keep the operating system running on a PC as the choice of the consumer, not one particular operating system vendor.
You may call me at censored if you wish or need further information.
-Daniel Hopson
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday August 14 2015, @08:56AM
Bravo, mon ami! I suggest we all produce ISOs of Linux that look exactly like MicroFe$T X. How hard could it be to mess up the internet this much? (rhetoical question, no reply needed.)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Pino P on Thursday August 20 2015, @01:08AM
And these distributions will come with Wine in the default install so that many EXEs will still install and run.
But then there'll always be a way to tell genuine Windows from imitators: Try to install and run a popular app listed as "garbage" in Wine AppDB, especially one that lacks a Linux-native substitute such as the iTunes store client or a game. If it runs, it's Windows. If it pukes, it's Linux. Games using any of several anti-cheat mechanisms, such as Punkbuster or GFWL, even check for unmodified copies of genuine Windows system files.
(Score: 2) by juggs on Friday August 14 2015, @11:31PM
As subject ^
Please keep up the journal entries should they respond in any way.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 15 2015, @04:16AM
g*dspeed danny ma'boy
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday August 15 2015, @06:51AM
I'm not familiar with how the process of launching antitrust investigations work, would it help if other people and organizations in the US also wrote the FTC in direct support of and with reference to the antirtust complaint you made? If that is the case (I'm not sure but I would guess so) this journal entry really belongs on the front page.
Aside from the whole Microsoft angle it's sad to see Toshiba do something as idiotic as this but then again they just (this July) had an accounting scandal with profits inflated by USD 1.2 billion :|
Might be a good idea not buy anything from them or any Fujitsu hard disks (they own that) because who knows what kind of “profitability measures” they'll get up to.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Saturday August 15 2015, @11:45AM
The reason I didn't ask for others to also write the FTC, is I was afraid that people with factual misunderstandings writing them could complicate the issue and perhaps result in the dismissal of the complaint.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Sunday August 16 2015, @01:15AM
Good point.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @04:28AM
If we install our own BIOS firmware, *we* decide what keys are allowed to sign boot-loaders. Tentatively I want to do this with Pre-UEFI BIOS booting a FOSS BIOS off a write-protected floppy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @09:47AM
If you are ever required to give more feedback, underline that the security considerations that led to secure boot, or more precisely the think of the children excuse that was used to push secure boot, are easily, more practically, and definitively solved by making the BIOS read only using a hardware switch or something like that.