7 ms·

Maybe I'm overly paranoid (but considering Microsoft's behavior over the past twenty years, it would be in character), I can't help but think that WSL is a stal

Maybe I'm overly paranoid (but considering Microsoft's behavior over the past twenty years, it would be in character), I can't help but think that WSL is a stalking horse for forbidding Linux from bare metal booting on consumer PCs. Revoke the Linux distro UEFI keys for "reasons" and there you have it.

pigbearpig 5y ago
Yeah, I think you're being overly paranoid.
vbezhenar 5y ago
Those fears will be reasonable when most computers will not allow disabling Secure boot. Right now that's not the case for x86.
- skohan 5y ago
  It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of the measures being put in place which would make this possible, especially given MS's history. To give an analogy, there might have been a time in East Berlin where people could have said: "It's fine that they check papers before crossing into West Germany. Your fears will be reasonable when they no longer permit entry."
- CursedUrn 5y ago
  Secure Boot is about to become the consumer standard with Windows 11. Popular online games are already starting to require it. I wouldn't be surprised to see Netflix and other streaming services require it.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Keep in mind that this is currently possible only because some governments were looking into persecuting MS for abuse of market power when Secure Boot was standardized.
deepstack 5y ago
I wouldn't put anything pass these guys (MS). Don't think you are overly paranoid. With MS, they backdoors, one can NEVER be too paranoid.
coliveira 5y ago
That's not paranoid at all. MS goal is to declare Linux a "legacy" environment, like they tried to do with UNIX in the 80s (the so called POSIX subsystem).
- Animats 5y ago
  I think of Windows as a legacy environment, having abandoned it when Windows 7 ended. That's when Microsoft exited the operating system business and entered the ad business.
- taeric 5y ago
  The part that really pains on this, is it is a common pattern in our entire industry. :(
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    Secure boot could be a good feature, but it can be severely abused. Some people really put effort in it to make it more secure. But the usual problems of certificate logistics leads to the case the Microsoft basically owns secure boot. Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation.
    - somehnguy 5y ago
      >Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation. Which is completely absurd. Within minutes of Netflix/anyone releasing anything new I can download it via Usenet or torrents. Nothing anyone does will change that reality. They just continue to make it more difficult for the average user to access content via player requirements for various DRM schemes. Which funny enough pushes people back to pirating to avoid all the nonsense. It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly.
      - errantspark 5y ago
        > It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly. I can't imagine doing this, to be honest if I were asked to implement DRM I would quit, or try to make sure there are fundamental flaws in the scheme, it's the only moral thing to do if you're put in that situation imo. EDIT: To those upvoting me, software as a service is usually DRM, so maybe hold your upvote if you're complicit.
geofft 5y ago
Microsoft is a very large company. Anyone who's worked at a company even a tenth the size of Microsoft knows how hard it is to get the company to pick a direction. The only real direction you can get everyone to agree on is "profit," and the nice thing about the existence of Azure as one of their major profit centers is that Microsoft now has a bunch of business that depends on Linux running well. A company mostly running Linux is already looking at them as third place behind Amazon and Google - if Microsoft risks making kernel developers unable to run Linux, they risk making kernel developers unwilling to accept patches to make Azure (or WSL) run Linux well. I'm not saying they're never going to try it, since the Azure org doesn't control the UEFI signing program, but I am saying there's a significant part of the company that will say that it threatens their profits to a scale much larger than the lost Windows licenses on consumer PCs. Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish#Examples_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.). The only thing harder than getting a company the size of Microsoft to agree on something is to get the rest of the industry to go along with it too. The few cases where they've succeeded (e.g., the thing from the 1980s where they made OEMs pay them even for machines that didn't ship with MS-DOS) were when they had a sufficiently technically superior product they could use to bully people. They don't have that power anymore.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish#Examples_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.). You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor. Netscape is dead (and Firefox is dying), all the historical competitors to MS Office are dead or have negligible market share, Java never got enough market share to make it easy for people to switch away from Windows, AIM/ICQ/whatever are all dead (and worse, nobody really uses XMPP or other open protocols), hardly anybody runs their own email server anymore, etc. They successfully destroyed all of the independent versions of these things, so that now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets. It's also kind of disingenuous to say "IE is dead" and "MSN Messenger is dead" and ignore Edge and Skype and Teams etc.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I have exactly the same fear. Trying to lock down boot on PC is pretty much exactly what they seem to be doing. Hello to shitty OS on PCs... (yes, every mobile OS is pretty bad)
delusional 5y ago
It doesn't matter if that's the explicit goal. Given the opportunity MS would do it.
Mikeb85 5y ago
I think this is something MS could try. However the whole computing paradigm has changed. Laptops/PCs are now 'trucks' and the 'cars' of the computing world are phones, tablets and consoles. Ie. Laptops and PCs are mainly used for work now, and lots of that work is being done on Linux. Lenovo ThinkPads can be shipped with RHEL, Fedora or Ubuntu. Several Dell laptops (including the highest end workstations) can be shipped with Ubuntu. Framework and System76 of course are Linux friendly/default. And most other makers allow disabling UEFI from the BIOS menu. Considering how much of MS' value is derived from Azure and that their main competitors are Linux-first (Amazon, Google), it'd be idiotic for them to try kill Linux again. You're right though, they'll probably try. I just have faith that enough hardware makers care about their users more than propping up WinTel like the old days (both Linux and AMD have made massive inroads).

pigbearpig 5y ago

Yeah, I think you're being overly paranoid.

vbezhenar 5y ago

Those fears will be reasonable when most computers will not allow disabling Secure boot. Right now that's not the case for x86.

skohan 5y ago
It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of the measures being put in place which would make this possible, especially given MS's history. To give an analogy, there might have been a time in East Berlin where people could have said: "It's fine that they check papers before crossing into West Germany. Your fears will be reasonable when they no longer permit entry."
CursedUrn 5y ago
Secure Boot is about to become the consumer standard with Windows 11. Popular online games are already starting to require it. I wouldn't be surprised to see Netflix and other streaming services require it.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Keep in mind that this is currently possible only because some governments were looking into persecuting MS for abuse of market power when Secure Boot was standardized.

deepstack 5y ago

I wouldn't put anything pass these guys (MS). Don't think you are overly paranoid. With MS, they backdoors, one can NEVER be too paranoid.

coliveira 5y ago

That's not paranoid at all. MS goal is to declare Linux a "legacy" environment, like they tried to do with UNIX in the 80s (the so called POSIX subsystem).

Animats 5y ago
I think of Windows as a legacy environment, having abandoned it when Windows 7 ended. That's when Microsoft exited the operating system business and entered the ad business.
taeric 5y ago
The part that really pains on this, is it is a common pattern in our entire industry. :(
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Secure boot could be a good feature, but it can be severely abused. Some people really put effort in it to make it more secure. But the usual problems of certificate logistics leads to the case the Microsoft basically owns secure boot. Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation.
  - somehnguy 5y ago
    >Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation. Which is completely absurd. Within minutes of Netflix/anyone releasing anything new I can download it via Usenet or torrents. Nothing anyone does will change that reality. They just continue to make it more difficult for the average user to access content via player requirements for various DRM schemes. Which funny enough pushes people back to pirating to avoid all the nonsense. It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly.
    - errantspark 5y ago
      > It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly. I can't imagine doing this, to be honest if I were asked to implement DRM I would quit, or try to make sure there are fundamental flaws in the scheme, it's the only moral thing to do if you're put in that situation imo. EDIT: To those upvoting me, software as a service is usually DRM, so maybe hold your upvote if you're complicit.

geofft 5y ago

Microsoft is a very large company. Anyone who's worked at a company even a tenth the size of Microsoft knows how hard it is to get the company to pick a direction. The only real direction you can get everyone to agree on is "profit," and the nice thing about the existence of Azure as one of their major profit centers is that Microsoft now has a bunch of business that depends on Linux running well. A company mostly running Linux is already looking at them as third place behind Amazon and Google - if Microsoft risks making kernel developers unable to run Linux, they risk making kernel developers unwilling to accept patches to make Azure (or WSL) run Linux well. I'm not saying they're never going to try it, since the Azure org doesn't control the UEFI signing program, but I am saying there's a significant part of the company that will say that it threatens their profits to a scale much larger than the lost Windows licenses on consumer PCs. Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish#Examples_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.). The only thing harder than getting a company the size of Microsoft to agree on something is to get the rest of the industry to go along with it too. The few cases where they've succeeded (e.g., the thing from the 1980s where they made OEMs pay them even for machines that didn't ship with MS-DOS) were when they had a sufficiently technically superior product they could use to bully people. They don't have that power anymore.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish#Examples_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.). You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor. Netscape is dead (and Firefox is dying), all the historical competitors to MS Office are dead or have negligible market share, Java never got enough market share to make it easy for people to switch away from Windows, AIM/ICQ/whatever are all dead (and worse, nobody really uses XMPP or other open protocols), hardly anybody runs their own email server anymore, etc. They successfully destroyed all of the independent versions of these things, so that now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets. It's also kind of disingenuous to say "IE is dead" and "MSN Messenger is dead" and ignore Edge and Skype and Teams etc.

raxxorrax 5y ago

I have exactly the same fear. Trying to lock down boot on PC is pretty much exactly what they seem to be doing. Hello to shitty OS on PCs... (yes, every mobile OS is pretty bad)

delusional 5y ago

It doesn't matter if that's the explicit goal. Given the opportunity MS would do it.

Mikeb85 5y ago

I think this is something MS could try. However the whole computing paradigm has changed. Laptops/PCs are now 'trucks' and the 'cars' of the computing world are phones, tablets and consoles. Ie. Laptops and PCs are mainly used for work now, and lots of that work is being done on Linux. Lenovo ThinkPads can be shipped with RHEL, Fedora or Ubuntu. Several Dell laptops (including the highest end workstations) can be shipped with Ubuntu. Framework and System76 of course are Linux friendly/default. And most other makers allow disabling UEFI from the BIOS menu. Considering how much of MS' value is derived from Azure and that their main competitors are Linux-first (Amazon, Google), it'd be idiotic for them to try kill Linux again. You're right though, they'll probably try. I just have faith that enough hardware makers care about their users more than propping up WinTel like the old days (both Linux and AMD have made massive inroads).