Longtime Reader of Techrights Explains How Malicious and Dangerous UEFI 'Secure Boot', TPM, and Vista 11 Are
From PCLinuxOS Magazine
A new issue of PCLinuxOS Magazine is out. They've E-mailed me about it and I summarised the technical articles in the sister site because some portions of this issue are non-tech or linkspam (Amazon referral and similar).
The following very long article ("The Death Of Windows 10: It's Worse Than You Think") stood out. Here are some portions from it:
So, what are the requirements for Windows 11? Let's take a look:
Intel Core processor above 7th generation; 7th-gen Core i7-7500U “Kaby Lake” does not meet the requirements.
AMD Ryzen 2000 processor and above, meaning all machines manufactured in 2017. 2017, 8 years ago, powerful machines capable enough to run any operating system. But not Windows 11. After all, Microsoft cares about the security of its customers, right? Right? Of course not.
Not to mention the TPM 2.0 module, which was a standard that Microsoft launched in 2015. That is, 10 years ago.
But first, let's analyze what it means to migrate to Windows 11, and then analyze what personal computing under the domain of TPM 2.0 might mean.
[...]
And again, I researched, with the help of AI, what remote boot time attacks exist. And this is what the AI replied: Statistically, there is no boot time attack if the attacker does not have physical access to the machine.
Consequently, all the security makeup that Windows 11 now presents is just that: makeup. Or, as the AI itself wrote, "Windows 11 promotes TPM and BitLocker as the cutting edge of security. However, this security is an illusion against real threats. In practice, it is a compliance tool for businesses and an effective barrier only against opportunistic thieves, while serving Microsoft's purpose of accelerating the sale of new hardware under the guise of security."
What about TPM 2.0? Let's see.
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In 2015, Richard Stallman suggested replacing the term “trusted computing” with the term “treacherous computing,” due to the danger that the computer could be programmed to systematically disobey its owner if the cryptographic keys are kept secret. He also considers that the TPMs available for PCs in 2015 are not currently dangerous and that there is no reason not to include one in a computer or support it in software due to the industry's failed attempts to use this technology for DRM, but that the TPM 2.0 released in 2022 is precisely the threat of “treacherous computing” that he had warned about. Linus Torvalds also expressed his dissatisfaction in 2023, frustrated with AMD's fTPM bugs, saying, “Let's just disable this hwrnd fTPM crap.” He said that CPU-based random number generation, rdrand, was equally adequate, despite also having its bugs.
On the BSD side, the FreeBSD community sees TPM 2.0 not as a necessary advancement, but as a lock-in mechanism that attempts to impose an external and opaque root of trust, undermining the principles of transparency, sovereignty, and total user control that are the foundation of an open-source operating system like FreeBSD. They prefer security solutions that are fully inspectable in the kernel.
However, it gets worse. Much worse with Remote Attestation.
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But I use PCLinuxOS!!! For me, these Microsoft things have no effect!!!
That's where you're wrong. As this “security” scheme (TPM+UEFI) has become an industry standard, the new normal is that all computers come with these useless and superfluous devices, at least for home users. And, obviously, with all these restrictions, it will become increasingly difficult to use any operating system other than the one that comes factory-installed with the machine.
Thus, open and free computing will become a niche, which only people who understand the dangers of all this control by big tech over users will be part of. And everything that belongs to niches is usually expensive and scarce.
Is there any hope? We will see below.
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Organizations such as the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the EFF see these mechanisms as a strategy to limit digital freedom, transforming the PC, which was historically an open platform, into a restricted device where the owner does not have the final say on the software that runs on their own hardware.
Go read the whole article. A friend of Techrights prepared it and seeing how much Microsofters hate him, we can only see that as a badge of honour. █