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Comment by the8472 | Hacker News Reader

> these types of features are necessary

No, they're not necessary. As you mention yourself in a later paragraph it can either be turned off or you can install custom keys

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They are necessary to get Microsoft to sign your keys, which is necessary to get Linux distributions to boot on modern hardware without getting the user to install custom keys (and that is a requirement because there is no standard way to configure UEFI Keys -- that's why the mokutils exist).

And I have to stress that they do actually solve real security problems and aren't of themselves a bad idea. The fact that you can inject unsigned code into the kernel as root is not a good thing.

I don't disagree that secure boot can be useful, but the distinction is critical. If you omit all those conditionals and shorten it into a necessity you're basically saying that subjecting yourself to microsoft is unavoidable. It's ceding the entire PC ecosystem to a single vendor, similar to vendor-locked android devices for example.

Unfortunately, it is a practical necessity if you want to have an operating system that the majority of the public can just pick up and use. Yes, I think it's utterly ridiculous that Microsoft acts as the primary signatory for most hardware by default, but pretending that isn't the case won't help distributions ship software.

I wish it wasn't the case, and it is crazy that we have given this power to Microsoft. But that is the current state of the world.

Microsoft is the only company that could have done it. They are the only entity that has teeth through (as you mentioned above) advertising dollars, logo certification programs, etc. Only they had the infrastructure to get the ball rolling. The biggest kicker, the one thing only, and I really mean only Microsoft could do, was provide the infrastructure for revocation. Without their ability to strong-arm (for good or bad), the industry just would have never agreed.

When all it takes is a rogue USB drive and a power cycle to own a machine, it presents serious problems in high security environments.

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