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Old 21st March 2015
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Default OEMs Allowed To Lock Secure Boot In Windows 10 Computers

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/03...s-10-computers

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Hardware that sports the "Designed for Windows 8" logo requires machines to support UEFI Secure Boot. When the feature is enabled, the core software components used to boot the machine are verified for correct cryptographic signatures, or the system refuses to boot. This is a desirable security feature, because it protects from malware sneaking into the boot process. However, it has an issue for alternative operating systems, because it's likely they won't have a signature that Secure Boot will authorize. No worries, because Microsoft also mandated that every system must have a UEFI configuration setting to turn the protection off, allowing booting other operating systems. This situation may now change. At its WinHEC hardware conference in Shenzhen, China, Microsoft said the setting to allow Secure Boot to be turned off will become optional when Windows 10 arrives. Hardware can be "Designed for Windows 10," and offer no way to opt out of the Secure Boot lock down. The choice to provide the setting (or not) will be up to the original equipment manufacturer.
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Old 21st March 2015
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http://srobb.net/seenit.mp4


Yeah, that was, IMLTHO (less than humble) going to happen sooner or later. If there were an assocation of non-WIndows users, for all the Linux/BSD users, I wonder if it would be enough to make manufacturers continue to make it possible to disable it. As it is, I suspect MS will put pressure on most of them to make it unable to be disabled, disabling the disable, so to speak.
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Old 22nd March 2015
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The only thing holding this nonsense at bay is the OEMs not wanting to be "that guy" that disabled it first. Anyone can come second, but to be the first jerk to enforce Windows only is something they seem at least reluctant to do, thankfully.

I don't expect it to last long once one of them is paid enough or finds some positive light to spin it in, though.
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Old 22nd March 2015
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If they get "paid" to do it (in some generalized sense), surely they will find the spin. But is it really worth it for them to do it without being paid? I suppose an extra few % of users may not make a big difference to one manufacturer, in a low-margin PC business. But if enough join the dark side, that might leave enough extra users to make a difference for someone else, who can play the good guy. Certainly points toward having much less choice though, potentially. Sucks.

Good thing I've been collecting old machines ... though a couple have died in recent months
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Old 22nd March 2015
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This is actually pretty irrelevant news. Microsoft is beating a dead horse by killing the business model (open hardware) which brought them to prominence . The Desktop market is dead anyway. Most consumer already use only hand held devices and cloud for their computing needs. Handheld devices are largely vendor locked (vendor supplies both hardware and OS) just like computers in 70s and 80s were locked.

Microsoft has lost the hand held device battle without firing a shot (they have never put anything worth using anyway). I am not up to date with the situation on the cloud front but IIRC situation from a year ago they were positioning themselves nicely. It looks that Microsoft Hyper-V has also some serious following even though ESXi is still the guy to beat. In spite of Red Hat hype with RHEV I think that Xen being used by Amazon and few other major cloud players is very well positioned on the market as well.

Open hardware server market is also getting scary. There was just a thread on the FreeBSD forum regarding firmware updates for Sun machines and it turns out not only evil Oracle but all vendors IBM, HP with exception of DeLL have locked their hardware and provide firmware updates only to their customers. That might be also too little to late as most small to medium shops like mine use OEM Supermicro servers and similar.

What is left for us Geeks to do? Well I am sincerely hopping that we are less than a year from open hardware really usable ARM multi processor server and desktop motherboards. There will be vendors like Raspberry
Pi who will try to vendor lock that market as well but I think that due to poor quality of their craftsmanship they ultimately be defeated or unable to completely lock the market.
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Old 22nd March 2015
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
In spite of Red Hat hype with RHEV I think that Xen being used by Amazon and few other major cloud players is very well positioned on the market as well.
RedHat rode the coat tails of the Rackspace/NASA joint effort to produce OpenStack, then when OpenStack was forked off as a foundation, it became a free for all. RHEV is just rebranded OpenStack running on top of RHEL...OpenStack itself is just a somewhat poorly implemented (IMHO) control suite for Xen...it's nothing fancy.

OpenStack as a whole has a long ways to go to be competitive in the public cloud market. It may have a niche in private cloud (typically dominated by ESXi and Hyper-V), but it lacks the polish and capability of many of the big cloud players (who all run closed-source Xen control frameworks, with the exception of Microsoft, of course).

Edit - I was employed by Rackspace as a Linux Engineer when Lanham Napier decided we'd had enough success in the Enterprise Managed Hosting arena and needed to get some of that cloud action to remain competitive. We started hearing about competition with AWS, Microsoft, and Google (companies who have near infinitely larger pocketbooks and "nerd pools" compared to Rackspace...in fact, Rackspace ate itself from the inside trying to supply Linux nerds to the cloud revolution taking place downstairs from the Enterprise support floor). I watched the hype of OpenStack drive the company stock up above $80/share, and I then watched the bubble burst and stock drop below $35/share nearly overnight. Lanham was a convincing guy, and his passion for moving to the cloud stuck with me (even after he left Rackspace), so I left Rackspace to find employment with AWS so I could see the cloud for what it is really capable of. Perhaps my views on OpenStack are a bit biased, but I call it like I see it.
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Last edited by rocket357; 22nd March 2015 at 05:15 AM.
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Old 22nd March 2015
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rocket357 View Post
RedHat rode the coat tails of the Rackspace/NASA joint effort to produce OpenStack, then when OpenStack was forked off as a foundation, it became a free for all. RHEV is just rebranded OpenStack running on top of RHEL...OpenStack itself is just a somewhat poorly implemented (IMHO) control suite for Xen...it's nothing fancy.

OpenStack as a whole has a long ways to go to be competitive in the public cloud market. It may have a niche in private cloud (typically dominated by ESXi and Hyper-V), but it lacks the polish and capability of many of the big cloud players (who all run closed-source Xen control frameworks, with the exception of Microsoft, of course).

Edit - I was employed by Rackspace as a Linux Engineer when Lanham Napier decided we'd had enough success in the Enterprise Managed Hosting arena and needed to get some of that cloud action to remain competitive. We started hearing about competition with AWS, Microsoft, and Google (companies who have near infinitely larger pocketbooks and "nerd pools" compared to Rackspace...in fact, Rackspace ate itself from the inside trying to supply Linux nerds to the cloud revolution taking place downstairs from the Enterprise support floor). I watched the hype of OpenStack drive the company stock up above $80/share, and I then watched the bubble burst and stock drop below $35/share nearly overnight. Lanham was a convincing guy, and his passion for moving to the cloud stuck with me (even after he left Rackspace), so I left Rackspace to find employment with AWS so I could see the cloud for what it is really capable of. Perhaps my views on OpenStack are a bit biased, but I call it like I see it.
I know that we are border line OT original thread but three thumbs up for this post. This is the kind of information which keeps me coming back to this portal for more and more. Did you mean to say that OpenStack is control suite for Xen or you meant to say KVM? Pardon my ignorance. Can you post anything on this thread?

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/f...2/#post-285200
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Old 22nd March 2015
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OpenStack is "hypervisor-agnostic", however in practice it tends to be implemented over Xen (i.e. Rackspace's cloud, for instance, which was, last I checked, the largest OpenStack installation in the world). Thanks for pointing that out.

I'm not terribly familiar with bhyve, unfortunately, but I want to setup a testbed for Xen/KVM/etc... on my network, so I'll add that to my #TODO list =)

Edit - as for the other post, unfortunately I haven't had time of late to mess around with NetBSD dom0. My wife and I have been preparing to buy a house hopefully this time next year, so every spare penny (save $10/month for two VULTR VPSs) has gone to positioning ourselves for buying another home.
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Last edited by rocket357; 22nd March 2015 at 06:19 AM.
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Old 22nd March 2015
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MS said that users can always change it from UEFI on x86 systems

if they are going to force it, then developers better get a signature to be able to use their OS on secure boor environments
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Old 22nd March 2015
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This does suck. But, it is probably going to be one of the lessor burdens "we" face in the coming future.

Devices that can only run approved (secure) code is a start. Even those devices will, eventually have limited local resources. The local O.S. being a workstation for a cloud like O.S. brought to you via web technology interface. Less and less hardware with capacity (USB ports) to transmit data to local storage devices (its safer on the cloud, right). Your online O.S. will be in a perpetual state of update (version incrementation), while you will need to continually buy a currently supported workstation (be it mobile or not). You'll need to have internet for almost all device functionality, likely that functionality will be part of a vendor owned network service. You'll be able to use your O.S. from anywhere, even if it isn't your device, since your O.S. and data are unconditionally linked to you. This will one day be maintained biometrically. It will be unlawful to tamper with these devices in effort to achieve other than vendor intended functionality, especially if you connect to the network with it. It'll be a blurry line between tinkering and terrorism.

Who knows how fast it'll all drop down? In the unlikely event that most people (the technically inept) aren't already begging for it (shiny Ipad syndrome) some major online catastrophes will begin to occur more and more often, threatening the simple minded users commercially and privately. Some propagandist headlines about peoples online technology luxuries being interrupted by evil hackers using unsecured devices. Certified non terrorist freedom will be opensource inside of an SDK, if any vendor allow for it. The SDKs will probably be limited enough to prevent any development that competes with vendor product.

I know it all sounds far fetched, but if you look around you its all but forced. Much of this is already a reality, as far as technological capacity is concerned. For the most part people get all the more pleased when some new shackle hits the market. The more shackles it implements, the more proud they are of the purchase.

It seems unthinkable, but maybe one day I'll have to order my O.S. over the mail, and agree not to attempt any connection to "The Network".

Maybe I'm just paranoid and imaginative. But, if stuff like this is real and actually pulls through, it won't be all that more difficult to make my paranoid imagination a reality.
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Old 22nd March 2015
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You could write your O.S. as an image file with the native boot loader inside of it. Write that image to a new partition. Then edit the Windows boot loader accordingly. Then erase the Windows partition and add the new space to your partition. Finally grow and slice space via your booted image. Instead of a installation process, you'd run a configuration process. (This would require tools made to run within Windows, like this.)

If you are a real hobbyist, you could remove the cancer and replace it with something like coreboot. The problem is that eventually some machines would probably require physical modifications.
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Old 22nd March 2015
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Quote:
Originally Posted by fn8t View Post
Devices that can only run approved (secure) code is a start.
I can't believe what I read. Approved by whom? Chinese government, Vladimir Putin or the same U.S. Senate which casually attached amendment to a counter-terrorism bill 266 of 1991 trying to force manufacturers of communications equipment to insert special "trap doors" in all their products?
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Old 23rd March 2015
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
I can't believe what I read. Approved by whom? Chinese government, Vladimir Putin or the same U.S. Senate which casually attached amendment to a counter-terrorism bill 266 of 1991 trying to force manufacturers of communications equipment to insert special "trap doors" in all their products?
Actually, the whole thing is just my own personal nightmare. Likely operating systems could gain certification by conforming to some government regulated standard. Certainly, it would be as bad if not worse then enforcement of blob inclusion.

I'm sure the IIC would be involved.

Last edited by fn8t; 23rd March 2015 at 12:58 PM.
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