8 ms·

Microsoft confirms UEFI fears, locks down ARM devices

254 points by zoowar 15y ago

recoiledsnake 15y ago
iPad has or had a monopoly in the tablet market, but where are/were the cries for an open bootloader? Where were the complaints to governments? Motorola and HTC phones/tablets ship with locked bootloaders while leveraging the hard work of F/OSS developers for free. Not to mention the Nook tablet/Kindle Fire which ship with a locked bootloader who get a free pass. Note that this will be the same set of people who will slag Microsoft for malware getting into the system and will recommend switching away from Windows because it is insecure. How about forcing Apple to allow users to load alternate OSes like Windows 8 or Android on the iPad?
- Jach 15y ago
  I'm not sure what you've been reading that I haven't, but I've seen plenty anti-Apple and anti-Amazon and anti-X cries precisely because of their lock-in attempts. From what I've read, the fact that Microsoft keeps doing it just means they won't learn their lesson, and Apple et al. doing it just means they're more evil than Microsoft in this respect. It's also a warning flag that as much as MS tries to win over the OSS crowd they still have some issues to work out. The law getting involved and being applied arbitrarily or just to MS though is very silly.
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    > I've seen plenty anti-Apple and anti-Amazon and anti-X cries precisely because of their lock-in attempts. As an X Window System developer, I often get confused when people use "X" as a placeholder. I thought, "but X doesn't lock people in...".
- X-Istence 15y ago
  iPad was developed by a single company. Apple built the hardware and software. Apple didn't force a manufacturer through licensing terms to lock down the bootloader to stop the manufacturers customers from loading an alternate OS. The thing that people don't like is the fact that Microsoft is saying through their licensing agreements with a manufacturer that they have to lock the boot loader down so that the manufacturers customers (Asus, HTC, Samsung customers) are not allowed to load an alternate OS.
- vena 15y ago
  Apple produces their own hardware, and the various locked Android devices are not being locked down by Google.
  - recoiledsnake 15y ago
    >Apple produces their own hardware Samsung and Foxconn and a lot of other suppliers make the hardware. Apple does not own the factories.
    - superuser2 15y ago
      That's irrelevant. Apple sells you the hardware; when you buy an iPad, you are buying an iPad, not a tablet computer that happens to be bundled with iOS. There is no expectation that you can use it as a general purpose computer. When I buy laptop, I am buying a computer. Full stop. If the vendor wants to bundle an OS, great, but I expect to be able to change it. It's far more offensive not to be able to run Linux on a mainstream laptop than not to be able to run Windows on an iPad.
      - cooldeal 15y ago
        >When I buy laptop, I am buying a computer. Full stop. If the vendor wants to bundle an OS, great, but I expect to be able to change it. Maybe it's time to change your expectations? Why is Microsoft liable for your expectations? Why not only buy laptops that meet your expectations? >It's far more offensive not to be able to run Linux on a mainstream laptop than not to be able to run Windows on an iPad. ARM laptops are nowhere close to mainstream. They cannot run any Win32 applications. MS is starting from zero here.
        burgerbrain 15y ago
        "MS is starting from zero here." No. Microsoft is starting at one hundred eight billion.
    - vena 15y ago
      Samsung is the factory contractor for the A5, Apple designed it and Apple owns it outright. Foxconn assembles Apple products and provides some off-the-shelf parts. Apple does not levy such licensing restrictions against another company's own product to run only Apple software.
- sjs 15y ago
  People have hacked iPads and iPhones to run Android. And nobody actually uses it because there is no hardware back button, etc. When hardware and software are a cohesive unit it's hard to run something generic on the hardware, or run the software on some other hardware. That is not the case for Windows, Linux, and Android, which is why people feel differently about that ecosystem.
  - cooldeal 15y ago
    Windows 8 ARM tablets won't have back, home or menu buttons either.
  - gcp 15y ago
    People have hacked iPads and iPhones to run Android. And nobody actually uses it because there is no hardware back button, etc. That must explain the lack of penetration of Android tablets! (They have no back button either)
    - sjs 15y ago
      Do they have a home button? I'm sure the answer varies but in general you need the hardware and software to agree on some things. That is my point. Even if the software is flexible such as Android 4 that will display the buttons if necessary, or use hardware buttons if they are available. AFAIK Android was basically unusable on iOS hardware, using the sleep/wake button in an odd way and other things that do not work well.
      - gcp 15y ago
        Do they have a home button? Nope. Only volume and on/off. At least that's what the Galaxy Tab has. As you pointed out, new versions of Android allow emulating whatever buttons the device doesn't have on screen. And the newest phones basically don't have any, relying entirely on the screen. AFAIK Android was basically unusable on iOS hardware, using the sleep/wake button in an odd way and other things that do not work well. This sounds like the port was botched. Nothing you said explains why it couldn't work. In fact the oppposite: you've already illustrated the button layout is irrelevant.
daeken 15y ago
I've been a Microsoft fanboy for a long time, and I've been speaking out about the Secure Boot brouhaha because there was effectively no evidence that they were actually attempting to lock anyone out, but this is simply inexcusable. Sad.
- melling 15y ago
  You can't seriously be surprised by this. Microsoft can't be trusted until their desktop monopoly is destroyed. I guess the US vs Microsoft is 14 years old this year. Maybe we've all forgotten how Microsoft destroyed all other PC OS'es and how Windows wouldn't run without Internet Explorer; Microsoft claimed it was part of the OS and there was no way to remove it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft "Microsoft's true anticompetitive clout was in the rebates it offered to OEMs preventing other operating systems from getting a foothold in the market" It shouldn't be a PC vs Mac world today. It should be PC, Mac, BeOS, OS/2, Linux, etc.
  - ekianjo 15y ago
    > It shouldn't be a PC vs Mac world today. It should be PC, Mac, BeOS, OS/2, Linux, etc. There are a number of small, niche systems around the world that few people know about. When something gets broad popularity it is natural to see only a few systems get the cake, the cream of the cake and the cherry on it while the others get the crumbs. "He who has more, gets more" if you know the saying. In the 80s you had a free market situation with personal computers and litterally hundred of brands to choose from. All incompatible. And only a few brands made it through the years, with the IBM PC standard getting the first place. Fast Market growth favors big players.
    - nitrogen 15y ago
      Fast Market growth favors big players. The current OS landscape has little to do with the size of the players, and everything to do with back-room deals between Microsoft and OEMs to e.g. prevent OEMs from loading BeOS on their systems.
dangrossman 15y ago
Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the tablet or phone markets. Heck, it's barely a market participant. If Apple doesn't have to let people install Windows on an iPad, then the same should apply to Microsoft. This time, there's no "but there's a monopoly and the rules are different for monopolies" excuse.
- kennywinker 15y ago
  But we're not talking about just phones and tablets... "[...] yesterday, Qualcomm announced plans to produce Windows 8 tablets and ultrabook-style laptops built around its ARM-based Snapdragon processors" Those will be locked out as well. This is exactly what Cory Doctorow was talking about in his article the other day about "the war on general purpose computing" - (http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html)
  - cooldeal 15y ago
    Sorry, that war was fought and lost won with the iPhone and iPad. If anything, Microsoft is better in the sense that it offers more share of the app cost to the developers and also doesn't charge tithes like Apple does on content.
    - fluidcruft 15y ago
      (yet)
    - aptwebapps 15y ago
      > Sorry, that war was fought and lost won with the iPhone and iPad. No, not really. There's still a long way to go. And Microsoft's revenue sharing model vs Apple's doesn't have much to do with that.
      - freehunter 15y ago
        This is part of why I bought an HP Touchpad when it wasn't on the fire sale, and a Palm Pre+ before that. The Palm folks (even at HP now) not only don't care that you're hacking their device, they actually actively encourage it. They've gone out of their way to provide an "oh shit" button for when you've completely frazzled the bootloader and nothing else works. The Touchpad runs webOS, Android, and Ubuntu, and HP/Palm doesn't give a shit. Now that their OS is open source, too, I'd love to see the rise of HP/Palm in the hacker community. They're not just accepting of hackers, they actively encourage it in all aspects.
salem 15y ago
The moral of the story is, don't buy a windows phone if you want to reflash it.
- kennywinker 15y ago
  Or an arm-based ultrabook.
  - sounds 15y ago
    Or an x86-based laptop with UEFI Secure Boot* * Windows 8 logo compliance still requires UEFI Secure Boot. This won't affect desktops as quickly but laptops come with minimal BIOS options. Managing keys to install another OS will be omitted by many laptop manufacturers.
    - cooldeal 15y ago
      Is it too much to ask to read the linked article? Please. >For non-ARM systems, Microsoft requires that Custom Mode be enabled
      - sounds 15y ago
        Yes, I read it. Did you? Microsoft is requiring Custom Mode not even be _present_ on some of its Windows 8 platforms. How long until they "let it slide" on the rest? You may be determined to let Microsoft do whatever they please with the hardware you rightfully purchased. That doesn't mean I have to let them.
- astrodust 15y ago
  Related: Don't sign an expensive OEM deal with Microsoft if they're going to lock you in to what could be a Windows Phone 7 type disaster. A smart OEM would avoid certification, instead focusing on making a product that could run Linux, or Android, or whatever WebOS becomes, instead of getting locked to a sinking ship. The reason people are drawn to Windows is because their x86 software from the 1990s still works. How many apps are going to work on ARM out of the box?
motoford 15y ago
And here I was starting to believe that other article about a calmer gentler Ballmer.
drivebyacct2 15y ago
And that's how Microsoft killed ARM based netbooks, ultrabooks, tablets, etc that could potentially run Linux because most OEMs will want to have them licensed for use with Windows 8. Can we rehash all the dozen posts about this from months ago when people swore up on down that Microsoft wasn't going to do... well, what the rest of us expect at this point?
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  "Can we rehash all the dozen posts about this from months ago when people swore up on down that Microsoft wasn't going to do... well, what the rest of us expect at this point?" This is almost the worst part of it for me. Those people get to play "the voice of reason" at the time, but they don't receive any of the deserved ridicule when their fantasy world doesn't pan out.
  - cooldeal 15y ago
    The people that "deserved ridicule when their fantasy world doesn't pan out" are the paranoid folks that claimed that MS is banning booting Linux on PCs. Microsoft updated the requirements so that OEMs are REQUIRED to provide an option to disable secure boot on PCs. Here we are talking about Post-PC devices that won't even run the legacy x86 code that Windows has a dominance in.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      "Here we are talking about Post-PC devices" Oh, so we are only talking about the proclaimed future of personal computing then? I guess it's perfectly fine then! No. Anti-consumerism deserves condemnation, no matter how you try to spin it.
  - mattgreenrocks 15y ago
    It's almost as if being Right On The Internet doesn't mean anything in the real world!
    - 15y ago
nxn 15y ago
Well, this piece of news certainly just killed my "Windows 8 App" project. Even though I really do like Microsoft's tech, I just cannot support this type of behavior in any way. Maybe with mono I'll at least be able to salvage the server side parts and target Android based devices instead.
kenjackson 15y ago
First, tihs document is about HW Certification. You can ship an ARM-based system that doesn't follow these rules, just won't be certified by MS -- much like many Android devices aren't Google certified. Furthermore, MS actually bent over backwards on x86 and required for certification that the option to disable secure boot be provided (they could have been silent on this issue): "Enable/Disable Secure Boot. On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A physically present user must be allowed to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of PKpriv." I'd wait for MS's response on ARM. They've taken some interesting architectural approaches with their current ARM implementation (striped and actually secure SD cards). There may be architectural reasons for this. Or it could be that there are security issues with it, given that UEFI on ARM is pretty new. But in any case, if this is important to an OEM they can simply not get HW certification. This doesn't block anyone from actually installing Windows 8 on ARM on machines w/o this capability.
- recoiledsnake 15y ago
  Agreed on rest of the points, but Windows 8 on ARM is more like Windows Phone in the sense that you can't ship an ARM based system like you can with x86. You need a special license, there will be no OEM or user installable versions of Windows 8 ARM.
  - tankenmate 15y ago
    Based on this you could make a case about this being an antitrust violation as they are tying one product (which is a monopoly in one arena) to another product in an arena which isn't a monopoly.
  - pdubs 15y ago
    What about MSDN? I suspect it will be on there as likely the only legal way for a user to install it.
    - recoiledsnake 15y ago
      Why would it need to be available on MSDN? Windows Phone ROMs are not on there. There will be emulators for developers.
daemin 15y ago
From my reading of the restrictions it appears that the restriction is only on adding new keys to the boot ROM. So makers could ship arm computers with appropriate linux keys in the ROM already, and still be compatible with the WIndows 8 requirements.
- justincormack 15y ago
  That would have to be a public key then. Which is just like allowing no key.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
Oh no, 0.0001% of all tablets sold this year may end up boot locked due to this. Assuming there's nothing more to the story. Let's panic.
brudgers 15y ago
The article is a blog post about a blog post about a blog post. The Windows 8 hardware certification requirements comprise three documents and more than 1000 pages. They are available here [warning license agreement required]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/hardware/hh748188 http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/hardware/hh748188
trotsky 15y ago
I may be missing something, but it doesn't sound like an OEM is prevented from including additional keys, from say cannonical and redhat, or even simply an OEM key that is used to sign a generic boot loader like grub.
- hetman 15y ago
  Meaning this is still much more open than the iPad.
scottdw2 15y ago
Vendor lockout is not the worst part. I'd worry much more about the executive branch. http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/139791 http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/139791 http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/4957 http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/4957
Derbasti 15y ago
Damn it, I was so sure that 2012 would be The Year of Linux on the Desktop. And now this! Kidding aside, there will always be IPhones/Playstations, which need to be jail broken and there will be proper computers. If anything, this UEFI lockdown will make it easier to find appropriate hardware for your Linux box/server, since all that Windows-centric gaming stuff will be sold locked down only.
losethos 15y ago
7/7 happened last time that happened. God is just. God says... it_figures mystic city Onesiphorus requited whithersoever Mothers close IRS vicissitude Forsake so_he_sess ravish

254 points by zoowar 15y ago

iPad has or had a monopoly in the tablet market, but where are/were the cries for an open bootloader? Where were the complaints to governments? Motorola and HTC phones/tablets ship with locked bootloaders while leveraging the hard work of F/OSS developers for free. Not to mention the Nook tablet/Kindle Fire which ship with a locked bootloader who get a free pass. Note that this will be the same set of people who will slag Microsoft for malware getting into the system and will recommend switching away from Windows because it is insecure. How about forcing Apple to allow users to load alternate OSes like Windows 8 or Android on the iPad?

Jach 15y ago
I'm not sure what you've been reading that I haven't, but I've seen plenty anti-Apple and anti-Amazon and anti-X cries precisely because of their lock-in attempts. From what I've read, the fact that Microsoft keeps doing it just means they won't learn their lesson, and Apple et al. doing it just means they're more evil than Microsoft in this respect. It's also a warning flag that as much as MS tries to win over the OSS crowd they still have some issues to work out. The law getting involved and being applied arbitrarily or just to MS though is very silly.
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  > I've seen plenty anti-Apple and anti-Amazon and anti-X cries precisely because of their lock-in attempts. As an X Window System developer, I often get confused when people use "X" as a placeholder. I thought, "but X doesn't lock people in...".
X-Istence 15y ago
iPad was developed by a single company. Apple built the hardware and software. Apple didn't force a manufacturer through licensing terms to lock down the bootloader to stop the manufacturers customers from loading an alternate OS. The thing that people don't like is the fact that Microsoft is saying through their licensing agreements with a manufacturer that they have to lock the boot loader down so that the manufacturers customers (Asus, HTC, Samsung customers) are not allowed to load an alternate OS.
vena 15y ago
Apple produces their own hardware, and the various locked Android devices are not being locked down by Google.
- recoiledsnake 15y ago
  >Apple produces their own hardware Samsung and Foxconn and a lot of other suppliers make the hardware. Apple does not own the factories.
  - superuser2 15y ago
    That's irrelevant. Apple sells you the hardware; when you buy an iPad, you are buying an iPad, not a tablet computer that happens to be bundled with iOS. There is no expectation that you can use it as a general purpose computer. When I buy laptop, I am buying a computer. Full stop. If the vendor wants to bundle an OS, great, but I expect to be able to change it. It's far more offensive not to be able to run Linux on a mainstream laptop than not to be able to run Windows on an iPad.
    - cooldeal 15y ago
      >When I buy laptop, I am buying a computer. Full stop. If the vendor wants to bundle an OS, great, but I expect to be able to change it. Maybe it's time to change your expectations? Why is Microsoft liable for your expectations? Why not only buy laptops that meet your expectations? >It's far more offensive not to be able to run Linux on a mainstream laptop than not to be able to run Windows on an iPad. ARM laptops are nowhere close to mainstream. They cannot run any Win32 applications. MS is starting from zero here.
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        "MS is starting from zero here." No. Microsoft is starting at one hundred eight billion.
  - vena 15y ago
    Samsung is the factory contractor for the A5, Apple designed it and Apple owns it outright. Foxconn assembles Apple products and provides some off-the-shelf parts. Apple does not levy such licensing restrictions against another company's own product to run only Apple software.
sjs 15y ago
People have hacked iPads and iPhones to run Android. And nobody actually uses it because there is no hardware back button, etc. When hardware and software are a cohesive unit it's hard to run something generic on the hardware, or run the software on some other hardware. That is not the case for Windows, Linux, and Android, which is why people feel differently about that ecosystem.
- cooldeal 15y ago
  Windows 8 ARM tablets won't have back, home or menu buttons either.
- gcp 15y ago
  People have hacked iPads and iPhones to run Android. And nobody actually uses it because there is no hardware back button, etc. That must explain the lack of penetration of Android tablets! (They have no back button either)
  - sjs 15y ago
    Do they have a home button? I'm sure the answer varies but in general you need the hardware and software to agree on some things. That is my point. Even if the software is flexible such as Android 4 that will display the buttons if necessary, or use hardware buttons if they are available. AFAIK Android was basically unusable on iOS hardware, using the sleep/wake button in an odd way and other things that do not work well.
    - gcp 15y ago
      Do they have a home button? Nope. Only volume and on/off. At least that's what the Galaxy Tab has. As you pointed out, new versions of Android allow emulating whatever buttons the device doesn't have on screen. And the newest phones basically don't have any, relying entirely on the screen. AFAIK Android was basically unusable on iOS hardware, using the sleep/wake button in an odd way and other things that do not work well. This sounds like the port was botched. Nothing you said explains why it couldn't work. In fact the oppposite: you've already illustrated the button layout is irrelevant.

daeken 15y ago

I've been a Microsoft fanboy for a long time, and I've been speaking out about the Secure Boot brouhaha because there was effectively no evidence that they were actually attempting to lock anyone out, but this is simply inexcusable. Sad.

melling 15y ago
You can't seriously be surprised by this. Microsoft can't be trusted until their desktop monopoly is destroyed. I guess the US vs Microsoft is 14 years old this year. Maybe we've all forgotten how Microsoft destroyed all other PC OS'es and how Windows wouldn't run without Internet Explorer; Microsoft claimed it was part of the OS and there was no way to remove it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft "Microsoft's true anticompetitive clout was in the rebates it offered to OEMs preventing other operating systems from getting a foothold in the market" It shouldn't be a PC vs Mac world today. It should be PC, Mac, BeOS, OS/2, Linux, etc.
- ekianjo 15y ago
  > It shouldn't be a PC vs Mac world today. It should be PC, Mac, BeOS, OS/2, Linux, etc. There are a number of small, niche systems around the world that few people know about. When something gets broad popularity it is natural to see only a few systems get the cake, the cream of the cake and the cherry on it while the others get the crumbs. "He who has more, gets more" if you know the saying. In the 80s you had a free market situation with personal computers and litterally hundred of brands to choose from. All incompatible. And only a few brands made it through the years, with the IBM PC standard getting the first place. Fast Market growth favors big players.
  - nitrogen 15y ago
    Fast Market growth favors big players. The current OS landscape has little to do with the size of the players, and everything to do with back-room deals between Microsoft and OEMs to e.g. prevent OEMs from loading BeOS on their systems.

dangrossman 15y ago

Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the tablet or phone markets. Heck, it's barely a market participant. If Apple doesn't have to let people install Windows on an iPad, then the same should apply to Microsoft. This time, there's no "but there's a monopoly and the rules are different for monopolies" excuse.

kennywinker 15y ago
But we're not talking about just phones and tablets... "[...] yesterday, Qualcomm announced plans to produce Windows 8 tablets and ultrabook-style laptops built around its ARM-based Snapdragon processors" Those will be locked out as well. This is exactly what Cory Doctorow was talking about in his article the other day about "the war on general purpose computing" - (http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html)
- cooldeal 15y ago
  Sorry, that war was fought and lost won with the iPhone and iPad. If anything, Microsoft is better in the sense that it offers more share of the app cost to the developers and also doesn't charge tithes like Apple does on content.
  - fluidcruft 15y ago
    (yet)
  - aptwebapps 15y ago
    > Sorry, that war was fought and lost won with the iPhone and iPad. No, not really. There's still a long way to go. And Microsoft's revenue sharing model vs Apple's doesn't have much to do with that.
    - freehunter 15y ago
      This is part of why I bought an HP Touchpad when it wasn't on the fire sale, and a Palm Pre+ before that. The Palm folks (even at HP now) not only don't care that you're hacking their device, they actually actively encourage it. They've gone out of their way to provide an "oh shit" button for when you've completely frazzled the bootloader and nothing else works. The Touchpad runs webOS, Android, and Ubuntu, and HP/Palm doesn't give a shit. Now that their OS is open source, too, I'd love to see the rise of HP/Palm in the hacker community. They're not just accepting of hackers, they actively encourage it in all aspects.

salem 15y ago

The moral of the story is, don't buy a windows phone if you want to reflash it.

kennywinker 15y ago
Or an arm-based ultrabook.
- sounds 15y ago
  Or an x86-based laptop with UEFI Secure Boot* * Windows 8 logo compliance still requires UEFI Secure Boot. This won't affect desktops as quickly but laptops come with minimal BIOS options. Managing keys to install another OS will be omitted by many laptop manufacturers.
  - cooldeal 15y ago
    Is it too much to ask to read the linked article? Please. >For non-ARM systems, Microsoft requires that Custom Mode be enabled
    - sounds 15y ago
      Yes, I read it. Did you? Microsoft is requiring Custom Mode not even be _present_ on some of its Windows 8 platforms. How long until they "let it slide" on the rest? You may be determined to let Microsoft do whatever they please with the hardware you rightfully purchased. That doesn't mean I have to let them.
astrodust 15y ago
Related: Don't sign an expensive OEM deal with Microsoft if they're going to lock you in to what could be a Windows Phone 7 type disaster. A smart OEM would avoid certification, instead focusing on making a product that could run Linux, or Android, or whatever WebOS becomes, instead of getting locked to a sinking ship. The reason people are drawn to Windows is because their x86 software from the 1990s still works. How many apps are going to work on ARM out of the box?

motoford 15y ago

And here I was starting to believe that other article about a calmer gentler Ballmer.

drivebyacct2 15y ago

And that's how Microsoft killed ARM based netbooks, ultrabooks, tablets, etc that could potentially run Linux because most OEMs will want to have them licensed for use with Windows 8. Can we rehash all the dozen posts about this from months ago when people swore up on down that Microsoft wasn't going to do... well, what the rest of us expect at this point?

burgerbrain 15y ago
"Can we rehash all the dozen posts about this from months ago when people swore up on down that Microsoft wasn't going to do... well, what the rest of us expect at this point?" This is almost the worst part of it for me. Those people get to play "the voice of reason" at the time, but they don't receive any of the deserved ridicule when their fantasy world doesn't pan out.
- cooldeal 15y ago
  The people that "deserved ridicule when their fantasy world doesn't pan out" are the paranoid folks that claimed that MS is banning booting Linux on PCs. Microsoft updated the requirements so that OEMs are REQUIRED to provide an option to disable secure boot on PCs. Here we are talking about Post-PC devices that won't even run the legacy x86 code that Windows has a dominance in.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    "Here we are talking about Post-PC devices" Oh, so we are only talking about the proclaimed future of personal computing then? I guess it's perfectly fine then! No. Anti-consumerism deserves condemnation, no matter how you try to spin it.
- mattgreenrocks 15y ago
  It's almost as if being Right On The Internet doesn't mean anything in the real world!
  - 15y ago

nxn 15y ago

Well, this piece of news certainly just killed my "Windows 8 App" project. Even though I really do like Microsoft's tech, I just cannot support this type of behavior in any way. Maybe with mono I'll at least be able to salvage the server side parts and target Android based devices instead.

kenjackson 15y ago

First, tihs document is about HW Certification. You can ship an ARM-based system that doesn't follow these rules, just won't be certified by MS -- much like many Android devices aren't Google certified. Furthermore, MS actually bent over backwards on x86 and required for certification that the option to disable secure boot be provided (they could have been silent on this issue): "Enable/Disable Secure Boot. On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A physically present user must be allowed to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of PKpriv." I'd wait for MS's response on ARM. They've taken some interesting architectural approaches with their current ARM implementation (striped and actually secure SD cards). There may be architectural reasons for this. Or it could be that there are security issues with it, given that UEFI on ARM is pretty new. But in any case, if this is important to an OEM they can simply not get HW certification. This doesn't block anyone from actually installing Windows 8 on ARM on machines w/o this capability.

recoiledsnake 15y ago
Agreed on rest of the points, but Windows 8 on ARM is more like Windows Phone in the sense that you can't ship an ARM based system like you can with x86. You need a special license, there will be no OEM or user installable versions of Windows 8 ARM.
- tankenmate 15y ago
  Based on this you could make a case about this being an antitrust violation as they are tying one product (which is a monopoly in one arena) to another product in an arena which isn't a monopoly.
- pdubs 15y ago
  What about MSDN? I suspect it will be on there as likely the only legal way for a user to install it.
  - recoiledsnake 15y ago
    Why would it need to be available on MSDN? Windows Phone ROMs are not on there. There will be emulators for developers.

daemin 15y ago

From my reading of the restrictions it appears that the restriction is only on adding new keys to the boot ROM. So makers could ship arm computers with appropriate linux keys in the ROM already, and still be compatible with the WIndows 8 requirements.

justincormack 15y ago
That would have to be a public key then. Which is just like allowing no key.

InclinedPlane 15y ago

Oh no, 0.0001% of all tablets sold this year may end up boot locked due to this. Assuming there's nothing more to the story. Let's panic.

brudgers 15y ago

The article is a blog post about a blog post about a blog post. The Windows 8 hardware certification requirements comprise three documents and more than 1000 pages. They are available here [warning license agreement required]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/hardware/hh748188 http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/hardware/hh748188

trotsky 15y ago

I may be missing something, but it doesn't sound like an OEM is prevented from including additional keys, from say cannonical and redhat, or even simply an OEM key that is used to sign a generic boot loader like grub.

hetman 15y ago
Meaning this is still much more open than the iPad.

scottdw2 15y ago

Vendor lockout is not the worst part. I'd worry much more about the executive branch. http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/139791 http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/139791 http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/4957 http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/4957

Derbasti 15y ago

Damn it, I was so sure that 2012 would be The Year of Linux on the Desktop. And now this! Kidding aside, there will always be IPhones/Playstations, which need to be jail broken and there will be proper computers. If anything, this UEFI lockdown will make it easier to find appropriate hardware for your Linux box/server, since all that Windows-centric gaming stuff will be sold locked down only.

losethos 15y ago

7/7 happened last time that happened. God is just. God says... it_figures mystic city Onesiphorus requited whithersoever Mothers close IRS vicissitude Forsake so_he_sess ravish