Summary: A few remarks about a new defect which is starting to attract media attention this morning, serving to highlight the lesser-discussed dangers of UEFI/EFI

TECHRIGHTS has been a rather prominent longtime critic of UEFI. We even got invited to speak to the top executives behind UEFI, involving several people on a conference call. They were hoping to silence/suppress my criticism by speaking to me for about an hour, but they didn't have anything substantial to say in order for me to change my mind. In fact, they only revealed other issues (throughout the conversation) which I later wrote about. The Wiki has plenty of details about that and it also covers examples or remote bricking of PCs (via UEFI). Truly nasty if not malicious, too.

"Stuff like UEFI also gives governments stricter controls over people (like dissidents)."There is a newly-discovered issue involving systemd and EFI/UEFI. This has shown up in several prominent online forums and also in bug reports for almost a week (or longer). I had mentioned it online for a while, but only earlier today did I decide I have enough of a confirmation regarding this severe problem. It is now mentioned in news sites, too [1,2,3], so I wanted to very quickly remark on it (due to lack of time), noting that here again we have an example of remote bricking by means of UEFI -- a subject that the NSA previously warned about (accusing China, warning that it had attempted to do something similar).

Don't accept UEFI. Like DRM, TPM and many other malicious 'features', it is intended to give corporations control over the users, rather than enable the users to control their computers better. Stuff like UEFI also gives governments stricter controls over people (like dissidents). ⬆

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. In A UEFI World, "rm -rf /" Can Brick Your System

   Running rm -rf / on any UEFI Linux distribution can potentially perma-brick your system.
   
   As a public service announcement, recursively removing all of your files from / is no longer recommended. On UEFI distributions by default where EFI variables are accessible via /sys, this can now mean trashing your UEFI implementation.





2. Running a single delete command in Linux can permanently brick some laptops

   It’s fairly stupid to run such a command, but usually not destructive to anything but the Linux installation. However, as it turns out, on MSI laptops it’s possible to completely wipe the EFI boot partition from inside Linux.





3. Running “rm -rf /” Is Now Bricking UEFI Based Linux Systems

   Running rm -rf / on any UEFI Linux distro can potentially perma-brick your system, Windows PCs also vulnerable