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Comment by the8472 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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