New trusted boot feature, supposedly to prevent malware (which unfortunately is a legitimate problem), allows the vendor (or more likely Microsoft) to decide exactly what operating systems you are allowed to install. This already happens with mobile phones, although some vendors (Apple) tend to be fascist about it, and some are very lax due to customer pressure (HTC).
Odds are servers will generally not enable this except where corporates want it; cheap laptops and Apple will probably enable it without providing an off switch; custom motherboards will leave it to the user, but since you can't build a laptop, it's still a worry ... and migrating existing users to linux will probably become a lost cause (not that it's easy now). I smell a major anti-competition lawsuit, but they have several very plausible excuses re security ... This may signal a new push for TPM, which after all is in most business laptops nowadays, but this may or may not happen given the apparently rather large software development cost (it isn't needed for this bit). The conspiracy theorist in me says if this becomes a matter of law or policy there will be some major cyber-attacks to "prove" that such things are needed ... Bottom line: If it has the "Designed for Windows 8" logo (next year), you probably can't run Linux on it; another possible outcome is you may only be able to run OSs approved by the hardware manufacturer, which could be very messy, less likely. China will be delighted: The cheaper and more widespread this nonsense becomes, the more of the expensive development is done by third parties, the easier it will be for them to really lock down cyberspace once they have political support for doing so (their incompetent, half hearted and illegal effort in Green Dam was successfully rejected by the people but that was before the Arab Spring, the hardliners are stronger now and economic chaos will likely make this worse). http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/09/21/062231/how-microsoft-can-lock-linux-off-windows-8-pcs http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/78727 Note to Freenet folks: I apologise for not being around much lately. I hope to be able to spend one day a week on Freenet consistently soon. I am cooking a small build, which you can test (please test it!), and I am hoping to make further tweaks on load management soon. However, some reports re performance are very encouraging e.g. ArneBab reporting 14KB/sec file insert speeds.
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