I have no illusion as how Microsoft is happy this will make it harder for users to move away from Windows.
This pressure on OEMs is an anti-competitive move by a monopoly abuser and, as such, must be dealt with properly.
This pressure on OEMs is an anti-competitive move by a monopoly abuser and, as such, must be dealt with properly.
If any of this does result in Linux being difficult (or impossible, for the average user) to install, it will likely be a minor bullet point in the big picture for Windows and Microsoft, since there are real and worthwhile benefits to locking down Windows and the hardware that ends up in users hands.
I do wonder what happens when someone wants a refund for the Windows portion of the price of a new PC. Assuming a hypothetical PC model didn't allow you to run anything but Windows, what use would there be in requesting a refund for it?
that will still bring great satisfaction.
Agreed with your first sentence but not really with the second. The idea is simply securing the boot process of an operating system from POST right through to the OS being ready for use. Having 2 operating systems is perfectly fine from that point of view as long as the integrity of the boot process can be maintained. Having a boot loader and 2 or more OS's available complicates things, but doesn't make it at-odds with secure booting.
Edit: Manually correcting autocorrect and adding a couple of words
Also, there is some incentive for the PC makers to remove the possibility to disable it: people won't be able to reuse their machines a couple releases of Windows down the road. The shorter the useful life, the more boxes they move and higher the profit they make.
Obviously, they won't think through the consequences of tying their future to Microsoft. That would require thinking beyond the next bonus window, something most managers can't.
Your wording is ridiculously deceptive. To get the sticker, they have to enable secure boot, sure. Secure boot is not an issue, as long as you can turn it off, which MS is not requiring. So no, MS is not putting pressure on OEMs to do anything remotely anti-competitive.
As for any incentive that PC makers may have for preventing secure boot's disabling, that's complete conjecture (even if it may be right in the future), so let's stick to the facts rather than FUD, ok?
True enough. They don't require manufacturers to make their computers competition-proof.
> So no, MS is not putting pressure on OEMs to do anything remotely anti-competitive.
Except that, in order to get the sticker (and to qualify to whatever incentive program Microsoft devises to go with it) manufacturers are required to make it at least very inconvenient to install anything other than the Windows that came built in. How can this be anything other than anti-competitive? A layperson can pop in a Ubuntu DVD and boot up a current PC and experiment with it. Two years from now, they won't.
PC manufacturer margins are so low any incentive will sway them. That's why every computer you buy with Windows comes with a ton of crapware - because crapware makers pay the manufacturers to do so and their low margins don't allow them to pass this offer up.
Dealt with by making an average Windows user more vulnerable to undetectable malware? The Chinese would be pretty happy with this.
Microsoft is feeling the pressure from Mac on the desktop regarding security and they should be banned from securing their machines? And this applies only to the "made for Windows 8" sticker, nothing else. It will happily boot on other and older machines.
The proper way to "deal" with this lies with conditions etc. imposed on the OEMs, not Microsoft who should have the right to secure their OS from undetectable rootkits. You're barking up the wrong tree.
I can't think of one reason why they wouldn't.
All of a sudden, no Windows box is bootable.
If it would, of course malware would install its key and remove MS one to make machine only bootable with their payload.
You seem to have no clue how UEFI works. The keys are not stored in some magical place in the cloud. Removing MS's key from UEFI(even if it were possible) will only make Windows on that machine unbootable.
In this case, the Chinese won't even need to do the cyberattack themselves. Just leaking one of the signing keys to a willing third party would be bad enough.
Since a system that doesn't allow the removal of a compromised key is useless, there would be a way to remove Microsoft's key from all successfully compromised machines, rendering them useless.
The only difference seems to be that some users would know that they were using secure boot, but not realise that the government could bypass it. I'm not sure that's a massive win for the government.
China has a big IT ambition and it surely doesn't want to get locked out of its own PCs, so it would try to push their CA into BIOSes just to be a first class citizen if they'll try to build their own OS. But the fact that they have their CA in the BIOS would be unsettling for some.