Bonum Certa Men Certa

Apology Still Needed From 'Gulagboy' (for Pushing Microsoft Vulnerabilities Into Linux, Under the Guise of 'Security')

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 15, 2023

Sorry Silhouette

THE world is managing to slowly move away from Windows in spite of obstacles put there over a decade ago (antitrust violation, obviously!) with help from hostile people. Microsoft is squeezing harder and harder, relying on artificial difficulties associated with a migration.

These hostile people are naturally hostile, so of course they attack and smear GNU/Linux advocates, who are rightly critical of them. They go as far as to compare those critics to wife murderers.

One of those hostile people is Matthew J Garrett, whom we've dubbed 'Gulagboy'. He never bothered to apologise for what he did. If 'Gulagboy' wants to redeem his reputation he needs to call out the mistake that UEFI 'secure' boot actually is, not send threatening E-mails to people who have said that for over a decade. Every month (almost) we find new vindicating material (this month too). UEFI 'secure' boot is not security; it's the opposite.

Yes, 'Gulagboy' still sends threatening messages (we'll show and properly repudiate these next year) to people who mention him online and he is siccing total nutcases, criminals, and serial harassers (for over 13 years already) in an effort to muzzle critics. He then proceeds to pushing TPM, Pluton, and whatever anti-competitive (and anti-security, e.g. 'Confidential Computing') measures Microsoft fancies trucking into its "most potent competitor".

He's doing this consciously. His only defence might be, he's not a security person, he is only pretending. Maybe he honestly doesn't understand the harm he is doing. Prior to that he did ACPI and this article was discussed in IRC for a couple of days. The summary: "Holding up some laptops from shipping GNU/Linux pre-loaded around the world come down to regulatory certifications for power management not currently being met on GNU/Linux while working fine on Windows..."

Where are the "Regulatory Requirements" against Windows, being a resource hog, power waster, and pusher to throw away perfectly fine PCs in order to buy new ones? What sort of "Regulatory Requirements" are these and who lobbies/decides on them?

If they truly care about those things, why do they not re-arrest Bill Gates?

Anyway, Linux is under attack. The people who are waging the attack have the audacity to also attack people who merely mention or explain the attack patterns.

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