Bonum Certa Men Certa

Updating Firmware is Not the Solution But Only Additional Risk, Disable "Secure Boot" Today

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 08, 2025

How to disable Secure Boot and UEFI

In the news:

Adding weight to the claim, Lee wrote that Phison engineers have since verified the findings in their labs, confirming that official production firmware does not suffer from the same anomalies

So Microsoft's Windows Update pushed faulty firmware (users could not opt out).

New report blames Phison's pre-release firmware for SSD failures — not Microsoft’s August patch for Windows

There's a lot of discussion this week (or late this past weekend) about faulty firmware being pushed into Windows. Microsoft has a go at blame-shifting, but don't buy their excuses and spin. It's like Microsoft blaming Blue Screens of Death (BSoD) on "bad drivers". Hello, Microsoft? These are Windows drivers. This is Windows!

Anyway, as we said several times already in the series*, firmware blobs are buggy, secret, impossible to audit, and barely tested. Any reasons to update them are typically outweighed by risk factors and realistic considerations.

In the case of UEFI, the important thing to do right now is disable "Secure Boot".

An associate said today: "If many GNU/Linux users have it turned off, the impact will be lessened. However, if many have it turned on, the damage will be severe, especially if it is the case that proprietary drivers require or even just recommend activating restricted boot."

Already escaping the "scene of the crime" until the dust (of the 9/11 aftermath) settles:

Off on holiday for the next week and a half, so the shitposting is likely to be happening in a different timezone

The principal culprit will pretend to be MIA.

Gone till November

____

* We're not done yet, but so far we have:

  1. The UEFI 9/11 - Part I - Introduction to Impending Catastrophe (Microsoft Preventing People From Booting Non-Windows Systems)
  2. The UEFI 9/11 - Part II - Campaign of Censorship and Defamation Against Critics
  3. The UEFI 9/11 - Part III - Chaos is Scheduled to Happen Second Thursday of September (No Matter What the Microsofters Tell You)
  4. The UEFI 9/11 - Part IV - External Interference
  5. The UEFI 9/11 - Part V - This is Not a Drill (Disable "SecureBoot" Now)
  6. The UEFI 9/11 - Part VI - This Serious Harm Was Planned for Over a Decade, Not an Accident or Merely Some Misfortune
  7. The UEFI 9/11 - Part VII - This Coming Week Many PCs Will Refuse to Boot "Linux" (Because of Microsoft's Expired Certificate)
  8. The UEFI 9/11 - Part VIII - Denial of Service and Selling Us WSL (Windows) Instead of "Risky" (Prone by Breakage by Microsoft) GNU/Linux

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