On the 'Digital Gulag' of 'Secure Boot' and Microsoft Disguising Its Attacks on Users as "Security"
Dr. Andy Farnell has this new article and here's a portion from it:
In the late 90s outside a railway station I remember laughing at two signs relating to CCTV cameras. The first said, in comforting, soft sans-serif;Relax. Area covered by CCTV. For your protection and safety.
How lovely. A warm fuzzy feeling of benevolent guardianship flushed through my being. But wait a minute… across the street I could see another notice, an angry red-bordered sign looking scornfully down, proclaiming in BLOCK CAPITALS;
WARNING: CCTV… blah blah PROSECUTION… blah blah ZERO TOLERANCE…
Eeeew! Now hold on. I'm confused. Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee seem to have got their messages mixed. Are they playing at "good cop, bad cop"? What gives?
As we have written in these pages many times, there are absolutely different kinds of "security".
- Security for you
- Security from (against) you
Making sure that you're thoroughly confused about which is which, is a serious business for some.
The second kind is obviously harder to sell to the people who are its targets. Marketing and public-relations messaging around this is sophisticated and slippery.
In digital technology, Microsoft are undisputed masters of getting people to pay for their own bars and chains, artfully muddying the waters around "security" as a bare noun. Stripping security of context adds ambiguity and allows abuse to be sold as security. Their products are indeed secure, for Netflix, for the music and film companies whose main threat is their own customers. Not so much for you end users.
Looking at this example a little deeper, locked-down software and even computing hardware is being aggressively pushed at gamers, branded as "anti-cheat", or "secure boot". Now, everyone hates cheats, except when they are one - and "AI" makes it ever harder to avoid being one.
The point is, it's not there to stop other people cheating. The digital locks are to stop you, the owner of the game and the computer, from cheating. Other people - other much smarter and motivated people - will still cheat. Meanwhile you bought into a digital gulag.
Like so many similar technologies, they punish the people who were never going to misbehave anyway.
After all those years UEFI still proves to be a giant bug door. It did nothing for computer security, it merely attacked computer users. █