On 09/27/2013 08:53 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 12:52 AM, Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>
>     Quoting from a previous post on this subject (thread) not from me:
>
>     UEFI is part of the old "Palladium" project from Microsoft,
>     relabeled as "Trusted Computing". It is aimed squarely at DRM and
>     vendor lock-in, not security
>
>     End quote.
>
>     Is the above language inflammatory?  If not, how is my language
>     inflammatory?  Mine merely restates in plain blunt English "DRM and
>     vendor lock-in", or so I intended.
>
> Had to think about this. For one thing, I'm not blaming Linux or calling
> it a categorical failure that all distributions don't work with all UEFI
> enabled hardware. For second, I've described the *purpose* of the
> feature, and I can back it up. The Wikipedia article has some good
> links. The PowerPoint presentation on Palladium by Brian LaMacchia makes
> it pretty clear. (Brian is one of Palladium's authors: look for it on
> Google if you like.)
>
> You went noticeably further with comments about how it's a categorical
> failure that Linux can't deal with this. It's been difficult because
> it's *designed* to lock out non-Microsoft-key-registered access. But
> there's good progress doing on, and some Linux providers have good shims
> working. I expect to see support in it from our favorite upstream vendor
> in their next commercial release.

I respectfully disagree.  The phrase you used was "vendor lock-in not 
security".  Presumably, as Microsoft is a for profit corporation with no 
other interests than a 100 percent captive market and profit 
maximization (the standard for-profit model in the USA -- only 
anti-monopoly government enforcement stops a monopoly unless the good or 
service being offered becomes obsolete, in which case the "market" takes 
care of the issue -- in many totalitarian states, the "government" is 
the monopoly), the "vendor lock-in" phrase meant that a vendor was 
locked-into Microsoft, not merely highly inconvenience for a possible 
competitor (e.g., open systems Linux or BSD).  Did I misunderstand the 
meaning of "vendor lock-in"?