UEFI: stand up for your freedom to install free software

The Free Software Foundation started a campaign to make people aware of the risks concerning UEFI:

They have written a statement:

You can read all about it and sign it here.

This is, in a sense, not very different from current DRM schemes (like the whole "Sony suing George Hotz" issue). At the moment UEFI is conceptually (well, in most aspects even technically) no different from the way that jail schemes work on systems like the PS3 or jailed phones.

The difference is we're not saying the term "DRM".

But that is where this is going. UEFI = DRM as relates to operating systems on PC hardware, as opposed to operating systems on proprietary design spec hardware.

And this means it is no different from me selling you a car with a lock on the hood and getting the government to back my legal assertion (via their monoply on violence that citizens in most countries outside the US have voted away their personal rights on) that you don't own the car, you merely licensed it and are forbidden not only from picking, breaking or otherwise opening or circumventing the lock, but also from understanding the workings of the lock and especially expressing your understanding of the lock to others.

None of this makes sense, and all of this is quite dangerous.

But the percentage of the public that will freak out about the letters "DRM" is much larger than the percentage that even know what "UEFI", "TrustedBoot" or the other symantically identical terms mean -- which is why the DRM Clan is moving in the direction of confusing the issue by inventing new marketing terms for these schemes.

To really push back against this and raise public awareness we need to coin a new term that encompasses and represents all such schemes. If we invent our own anti-marketing term such along the lines of "Crypt Locking Mechanism" (which conveniently reduces to "CLM" which recalls "DRM") then we can illustrate the issue easily by publicly asking questions about new customer constraint schemes as they relate to the "CLM" definition.

So, instead of waging public awareness campaigns to spread understanding of what this or that acronym is, we can instead simply equate [New sneaky DRM scheme] == CLM in the public discourse and people can instantly recognize what the issue is.

Yeah, the SL forums probably aren't the best place to push an idea like this. But I think you catch my drift. If I have time I'll write a more correct blog post about this as a reference in the event anyone wants to actually pursue this issue. It is of the utmost importance, but I just don't know if anyone is even paying attention.

I forgot. In other news the ultimate campaign against this sort of thing has nothing to do with software, but hardware. If any x86 or PPC chip makers continue to make chips that are competitive on the cycle/price line but do not have such CLM mechanisms built into them, then buying and promoting only those chips and not the ones that enable CLM schemes in the first place is the best way to defeat this sort of thing.

Does that mean you won't be able to enable a TrustedBoot feature on your own computer? Yes. It does mean that.

Do you really need to worry about an Evil Maid attack because you're such an overwhelmingly important espionage target? No. Even when I really was an overwhelmingly important espionage target this sort of attack was pretty low on my threat continuum. But anyway, governments may need this. Extremely sensitive and expensive corporate secrets may need this sort of protection. But you and I don't to do our daily work or safely use online banking sites. There are other methods of verification which are workable and do not require the hardware to lock out "foreign" operating systems.

Besides, all this stuff gets cracked within a few weeks of release (if not before) anyway, so what is the use other than to lock out the legitimate users from doing interesting things to their own systems?

The fact that anything can be cracked (or hacked) is not relevant. It is about the fact that others decide for you that you can ONLY use software on it that has been approved by someone else with the result that youc an ONLY use Windows on a pc. That goes against your rights and freedom (you buy a product, you have the right to use it the way you want. Compair it to buying a car where the car manufacturer decides you can only drive it on the highway and when on other roads the engine automatically shuts down...