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Australian Users Petitioning Against Windows 8 Secure Boot
In his first accepted submission, lukemartinez sends in an excerpt from a ZDNet article on continuing developments about Microsoft's UEFI secure boot requirements: "The Linux Australia community began petitioning the ACCC this week after Microsoft aired plans to mandate the enabling of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface's secure boot feature for devices bearing the 'Designed for Windows 8' logo. This means that any software or hardware that is to run on the firmware will need to be signed by Microsoft or the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to be able to execute. This would make it impossible to install alternative operating systems like Linux..."
Delimeter has further information on the petititions, and Matthew Garret recently posted a follow-up to Microsoft's response to the concerns about secure boot, calling them out on their misinformation.
This isn't designed to stop viruses (though theoretically it could help a little), this is part of Microsoft's anti-piracy push. Current methods of pirating Windows involve loading up something before the kernel to trick Windows into thinking it is installed on a machine with an OEM license. Obviously if the BIOS won't hand off to unsigned code then this becomes impossible and this method of piracy (which has been in use since Vista's time) is no longer viable.
Hence why the don't want OEMs to give you the option to disable this feature or to load up your own keys. If they did then it would solely be a security feature and do nothing for piracy. Given that, it explains why Linux people are so worried, because Microsoft is pushing for exactly this and Linux is about to get caught in the crossfire.
Circumventing a protection system? I'm glad nobody passed a law boneheaded enough to make that illegal even if you're not breaching any copyright .
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/09/27/2130245/canadian-government-says-drm-circumvention-not-related-to-copyright
Slowly the pieces are coming together...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'