[liberationtech] UEFI and who controls your computer? Fedora 18 Linux to be cryptographically signed by Microsoft.

[Lee Fisher]

 > The UEFI specification itself does not require that there be any
 > mechanism to disable this functionality.

But I believe the NIST mandate for BIOS-secured systems does have this 
requirement.

An alterantive to UEFI is Linux-based CoreBoot. It's free, whereas all 
UEFI implementations are commercial. Ask you OEM to offer this as an 
alternative.
http://www.coreboot.org/

In addition to Microsoft's upcoming Win8 devices, Apple has been locking 
down EFI-based hardware for a while. Mac Mini Server is EFI-based, and 
Apple has configured it's hardware to only permit Mac OS X Server as the 
only OS. So MSFT is conceding to unlock X86 boxes, but APPL doesn't yet 
concede this, AFAIK. I think MSFT is just emulating APPL, and copying 
how they used EFI to lock down their own hardware. :-(