Using the capital punishment symbol instead of the killed in action symbol suggests windows was executed after the war (likely by installing linux lol)
There are variations of the Skull and Crossbones here that have specific meaning?
On wikipedia, capital punishment is a skull and amd bones, killed in action is a christian cross
Thats kinda shitty its a cross. Like holding one religion above the others on a fucking encyclopedia.
It is not a Christian cross, the symbol is the dagger † which is also often used for adding post-scriptum information or challenging parts of a text.
People often mistake it for a cross, given the look, but there’s no actual preference towards any religion here.
The cross is an entirely different unicode character: ✝
Huh TIL. I searched just to confirm and its listed even on wikipedia itself. Thanks for claifying.
I learned one morning that a cmos battery could become a resistor. It can fail in a way that it’s not working nor completely dead but passes just enough current to make a server motherboard that otherwise might A: Work, B: detect it’s dead/missing and boot anyway with defaults to instead C: just freeze and not do anything. That was a fun full day of time wasted.
When I was 12, I thought I had broken the family computer trying to get Ultima III to run. I read every MS-DOS manual I could find trying to fix it before someone found me out. It was the frikin CMOS battery. I learned a lot of DOS that summer.
Does “Secure Boot” actually benefit the end user in any way what so ever? Genuine question
For you? No. For most people? Nope, not even close.
However, it mitigates certain threat vectors both on Windows and Linux, especially when paired with a TPM and disk encryption. Basically, you can no longer (terms and conditions apply) physically unscrew the storage and inject malware and then pop it back in. Nor can you just read data off the drive.
The threat vector is basically ”our employees keep leaving their laptops unattended in public”.
(Does LUKS with a password mitigate most of this? Yes. But normal people can’t be trusted with passwords and need the TPM to do it for them. And that basically requires SecureBoot to do properly.)
That’s only one use of secure boot. It’s also supposed to prevent UEFI level rootkits, which is a much more important feature for most people.
True. Personally, I’m hoping for easier use of SecureBoot, TPM and encryption on Linux overall. People are complaining about BitLocker, but try doing the same on Linux. All the bits and pieces are there, but integrating everything and having it keep working through kernel upgrades isn’t fun at all.
Well yes, assuming that:
- you trust the hardware manufacturer
- you can install your own keys (i.e. not locked by vendor)
- you secure your bios with a secure password
- you disable usb / network boot
With this you can make your laptop very tamper resistant. It will be basically impossible to tamper with the bootloader while the laptop is off. (e.g install keylogger to get disk-encryption password).
What they can do, is wipe the bios, which will remove your custom keys and will not boot your computer with secure boot enabled.
Something like a supply-side attack is still possible however. (e.g. tricking you into installing a malicious bootloader while the PC is booted)
Always use security in multiple layers, and to think about what you are securing yourself from.
It’s so secure that the first thing under Wikipedia’s entry for Secure boot is Secure boot criticism
Yes this is a real, I’m not joking.
It’s not the first thing, it’s in the middle.
under Wikipedia’s entry for Secure boot
What’s the first thing under the “Secure boot” section? The section that it automatically scrolls to when clicking my link?
Secure Boot
The UEFI specification defines a protocol known as Secure Boot, which…
…
UEFI shell
…
Classes
…
Boot stages
…
Usage
…
Application development
And finally
Criticism
What all am I looking at here? Or is this all meme?
most competent Microsoft developer
You mean Bing AI
I have a motherboard in a state where it won’t boot unless you pull and reinsert the cmos battery. After this it will boot exactly once.
It will also boot without issue if you don’t have a cmos battery at all. This is obviously not ideal.
I wonder if these issues are related? I purchased the motherboard second hand in this state about a year ago. So it is far too early for this update, but it remains a mystery.
Y’know the setting in the bios where you can choose boot on power restore, stay off or last state? This relies on a capacitor on the motherboard near the bios battery to store the last state. This 5 cent capacitor can die and sometimes behave like you are saying. I had a repair guy fix it cheap and that server worked normally after that.
Have you tried putting in a new battery?
First thing I tried yeah, I tested a few and verified with a multi meter. It isn’t that sadly :(
