Chris Samuel <chris@csamuel.org> wrote:
This looks like something to keep an eye on.. Matthew Garrett (the guy who makes peoples laptops work with Linux and has to deal with EFI & Linux - makes you wonder what awful thing he did in a past life) writes about a worrying requirement for Windows 8 logo certification for hardware vendors..
Matthew Garrett is also a superb speaker at conferences, including LCA. As he also notes in that post, UEFI provides for an option to disable "secure" boot, but vendors who only implement the minimum necessary to achieve Microsoft hardware certification are unlikely to include it. In short, locked-down Windows machines are on the way. I also wonder whether competition law might step in if most vendors were to opt to supply hardware without a BIOS switch to turn off "secure" booting.