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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if this will affect non-OEM motherboards, like those sold on Amazon and Newegg?

Nobody knows if this will affect anybody at all, as no Secure Boot equipped hardware is in the wild, nor has any manufacturer or OEM announced anything related to it. The fear mongering is based on speculations and worst case scenarios mostly.

edit: I might add that any system that wants to be compatible with Windows 7 or XP needs to have the ability to disable Secure Boot. That fact will probably have larger effect on manufacturers than Linux users.

> I might add that any system that wants to be compatible with Windows 7 or XP needs to have the ability to disable Secure Boot. That fact will probably have larger effect on manufacturers than Linux users.

But MS could update Windows 7 & XP to be compatible, right?

In theory, yes. But there would be a load of incompatible installation CD/DVDs in the wild, and there is the problem of patching an unbootable system.

I agree that this is based on worst case scenarios , but it isn't really a bad thing to be concerned about since nobody has actually ruled out the worst case happening and it represents a plausible possibility to many people.

Even if to begin with it is not a problem and windows 8 does not require secure boot to be enabled for compatibility with older computers it is still possible that windows 9 or even a later service pack will change that once they are happy that there is sufficiently few older computers.

This could create a market for motherboard modification that would allow pirated versions of windows to run.

Getting Windows to run is the least of problems in the current light. The problem is running something that's not Windows. Nobody cares about some lousy pirates.

lousy pirates care about lousy pirates. In many countries pirate windows is the #1 OS

In short, no. The secure boot is essentially optional from what I've seen so far; put Windows 8 on any old motherboard and it should work.

The whole reason this has come about is due to the vulnerability of people faking BIOS IDs and manufacturers on startup, allowing auto-authentication of pirate copies of Windows Vista and 7. In order for this auto-authentication to work in Windows 8 on a shipped bundle, secure boot will need to be activated. After the initial secure boot and activation, hopefully it can be turned off and allow more open access on OEM machines. (If it doesn't, then we have a problem.)

Well, the need to change some obscure option in BIOS is quite a problem already from the end-user perspective.

It's a pain agreed, but hopefully doesn't affect the ability to keep your system open enough to install non-windows OSes or restrict using non OEM equipment to run Win8.

Great.. so its a good thing then, because maybe IT people will realize its not even worth pirating Windows (well, actually they won't be able to). Then they just edit the BIOS setting and install Linux.

It stops an avenue of piracy sure, it also stops code injecting into the startup which is also cool. The fun bit is going to be all the disk encryption software that will take a hit when people migrate to 8 (unless it's signed).

Most likely not, unless you plan on applying for the Windows 8 official logo program.

Which manufacturers will probably do because it will imply a license discount.

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