Anderson Window Lock Replacement

Why do Linux fanatics want to make Windows 8 less secure?   by Jinnet

The FUD is flying fast and furious over Windows 8, and the OS isn’t even in beta yet.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is organizing a petition-signing campaign over Microsoft’s announced support for the secure boot feature in next-generation PCs that use Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) as a replacement for the conventional PC BIOS. My ZDNet colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is urging his readers to sign the petition with a bit of deliberately inflammatory language, calling it “UEFI caging.”

The crux of their argument is that Microsoft is deliberately requiring a change in next-generation hardware that will make it impossible to wipe off a Windows installation and install Linux. They are wrong, and their effort to whip up public fury is misguided at best and cynical at worst.

Allow me to illustrate by turning the argument around in an equally cynical way, with an equally inflammatory rhetorical flourish:

People who make their living in the Linux ecosystem are demanding that Microsoft disable a key security feature planned for Windows 8 so that malware authors can continue to infect those PCs and drive their owners to alternate operating systems.

Oh, wait. Now that I think about it, that’s actually pretty close to the truth.

The most disappointing part of this whole phony controversy is that its ringleaders have managed to suck in some people who should know better. Like Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at the University of Cambridge Computing Laboratory, who wrote this last month:

I hear that Microsoft (and others) are pushing for this to be mandatory, so that it cannot be disabled by the user, and it would be required for OS badging.

This is grossly incorrect. It is disappointing that a university researcher who should believe in scientific rigor and respect for facts would spread a rumor that begins “I hear thatâ