Everybody's heard of the fatal flaws in Intel's Reference UEFI, which is used by most mobo manufacturers:
https://www.mitre.org/publications/technical-papers/presentation-extreme-privilege-escalation-on-windows-8uefi-systems
This has been known for quite a long time, and has been warned for by the linux community from day one, even from before UEFI was actually implemented. When Microsoft then announced UEFI Secure Boot, everyone in the open source community knew exactly what this was all about: an NSA front door.
As it turns out, the Wintel Alliance has been providing this front door since the first day, and it allows for undetected and undetectable (from within Windows) front door complete system access (even encryption can't save you).
After it had been discovered, extreme measures were taken to keep it quiet, and Intel only very reluctantly started "making patches available"... yes, not rolling them out actively... only people that actually ask for it, have access to these patches. And here's the thing: there currently (almost a year after the discovery) is NOT ONE SINGLE third party mobo manufacturer (except Intel itself), that has patches available for this!!!
So there is a definite will to keep this front door wide open.
Now for the good news: it's only a problem on Windows 8 and later versions, and only on Intel PC's with UEFI, and it's possible to run Windows 8/8.1 in a kvm container in linux in such a way that the UEFI cannot be accessed by the software console. AMD systems are not affected, nor are BIOS systems.
Anyway, I think it's a disgrace, and I can't believe nobody even reacts. I think it's immoral to use Windows 8 and later, and even more immoral to promote the use of these malware suites.
I'm curious how much people even care about this. Do you guys even care that your system has front door NSA (and everyone else now because the technique is well published) access? Don't you think that it's enough reason to either stay with Windows 7 (only available until end of this month), or go full open source? Don't you guys hate it that you pay money for hardware and software that is basically a deep bug of corporations and the US military apparatus?