Microsoft's Sabotage of Dual-Boot Was a Wake-up Call and a Warning Against Outsourcing of "Trust"
Trust your own judgement, not Microsoft's discretion
THE Linux Foundation's Certificate Authority, Let's Encrypt, may be dominant on the Web, but in Geminispace, i.e. gemini://, it seems to be on the way out. As shown above: "2560 (89.6 %) capsules are self-signed, 42 (1.5 %) use the Certificate Authority Let's Encrypt, 254 (8.9 %) are signed by another CA (may be not a trusted one)."
Almost down to 40 now. And that was a day ago. In the next update cycle it might go below 40 already.
This is a gradual departure from a flawed (fake) security model.
One can hope that people will similarly work to eradicate "secure" boot, which turns out to be what we said all along it was (or would become) - a mechanism for vandalism by Microsoft. It's how Microsoft curbs adoption of GNU/Linux. Later today we'll see some preliminary September data about GNU/Linux usage in September. For the time being it shows bubbles because data is not available yet:
How much permanent damage did Microsoft do by destroying millions of dual-boot setups? Microsoft tried hard to change the subject [1, 2] by talking about LinkedIn and WINE*.
The sabotage carries on, but there are things we can do to slow it down if not undo it.
Outsourcing of trust means a de facto "kill switch" controlled by some apathetic third party to whom you're not a client. It's ripe for endless abuse, either at present or in the future. First, more people must recognise that this problem exists. █
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* "I did not see this one earlier," an associate said today, "for obvious reasons, but WINE's leaders are fools to take this white elephant (i.e. an expensive burden to maintain for the sake of perceived vanity). Among other things, the Ars article engages in openwashing of Microsoft .NET. It also means that Microsoft will further break compatibility so as to unduly burden WINE and make the project look bad and, by extension, FOSS. Anyway, that is a "donation" and not a donation."