Re: [opensuse-project] Thoughts on the UEFI fee?

On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 10:18:51PM +1000, Basil Chupin wrote:

On 06/06/12 21:23, C wrote:

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On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 1:15 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:

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Is this "blog", or whatever, is now telling me that I have been booting my computer INSECURELY for the past 30 years? It's not Swapnil telling you... he's just the messenger. Don't shoot him, he's a member of the openSUSE community too :-)

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The problem here is UEFI.

So, get rid of the parasite. In a perfect world.. but the harsh reality is, it IS coming, and it will be a part of all hardware in the not so distant future. Supposedly not possible to disable on ARM devices, and can be disabled in the BIOS on all other devices.

We can bury our heads in the proverbial sand, and hope it goes away... or we can face the reality that it will be here regardless of what we think.

So, do we make the best of the situation? Or do we do nothing, and openSUSE simply won't work (unless you're technically savvy enough to register your own keys or know how to bypass UEFI) on new UEFI limited hardware where other distros will?

C.

I take it that it is something which is part of BIOS as we now know it. So, if a manufacturer decides not to provide this abomination in their chip(s) then it would not be a problem and people would then buy systems using these unadulterated chips?

There was this thing called DRM introduced a few years ago and for which a crack was released only hours after DRM was first used in a device.

Microsoft can go and fly a kite as the world is not that stupid about its intentions.

The BIOS vendors likely will need to include it as it is a Windows 8 certification requirement. So we will probably have some support like this. This will be fun, as Fedora will be doing signed kernels et al, on how we do this with our quite open buildservice... Ciao, Marcus -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org