Not much to say here except: told you so!
Its up to the OEM to decide whether or not it can be turned off.
Fear monger, fear monger, blah blah, MS sucks /thread.
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Have you ever seen an OEM not enabling a "security" feature when they have a choice? Like with Intel Boot Guard? I don't. Why should I expect any OEM to decide differently here?
The discussion isn't whether or not it'll be used the discussion is whether or not it can be turned off. Which it can, if the OEM wants to allow.
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Or to put it another way: OEMs can no sell you hardware which will only run the software they want you to run.
If you don't see a problem with this you're either ignorant or you don't understand.
People accept that every day when they buy an iPhone.
Anybody who cares will do the research to buy a PC that isn't locked down or will build their own machine. Or they will just buy one that comes with the OS they want.
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And because iPhones are such a good idea, let's do the same with desktops!
Like everybody who cares about having a locked down smartphone will do research and buy one that's not locked down… like, they won't buy a smartphone because they all are. Or they'll just build their own smartphone!!1
I'm pretty sure that building your own PC and installing Windows on it is also going to be more trouble so even if you don't care about non-microsoft operating systems this should worry you.
But all of that misses the point: if you buy a piece of hardware, it'll run whatever the OEMs want you to run. To be more precise: it'll run only what the people who have the private key want you to run.
Guess what: the NSA can just go to them, get the key, and then update the firmware to whatever they want you to run. Even worse, OEMs tend to loose the keys because they're one of the best targets if you want to hack a shitload of people. With the key they can create rootkits that can't be removed. They brick your hardware!
All of that in the name of security.
OK, you can keep wearing your tin foil hat and I'll keep building PCs putting whatever OS I want on them.
By the way, good straw man you had there.
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To be precise. Its not about not having the security feature. The feature will be there no matter what so OEMs do nt have that excuse. Will the switch to turn it off/on be there is the question.
@RH00D Its about having the fear is that the OEM will take agreements with Microsoft to keep the switch disabled, thus locking you to windows. Microsoft has done that before and they would do that to lock out competition. If they are left to their own devices they WILL do this.
My hope is what happened last time with Win 8 will happen again. The Enterprise distos alongside the community uproar will force them not to do that and introduce a rule that forces the switch to be present.
I never said those things didn't happen, so you haven't proven anything here.
Stop trying to use straw man arguments.
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