>"officials said they had determined they could address concerns raised by civil liberties advocates"

Sorry, that is impossible, unless by "address" they mean "dismiss". If the government (and also private industry) in any way collects the information, it will be abused. Period. Regardless of what they say they will do, they will store the info for extended times, share it with all the black-ops agencies, index and associate it with all kinds of other databases, and search it at will, without a warrant, with impunity and without even audits.

Anyone that thinks otherwise is just totally naive and living in some fantasy world. The only safe data is the data not collected in the first place. Wake up people- the only real way to ensure data privacy is to prevent its collection in the first place.

Exactly. I was about to post the same thing. I am responsible for no less than 160 Linux desktops, laptops, and servers at work, home, family, etc.. Not a SINGLE one of them is using Gnome desktop. And based on a rough estimate at our Linux/Unix user's group, I would say perhaps less than 10% use Gnome on any of their machine.

Now, if they said "popular" desktop or something, fine. But "primary"??? Give me a break.

>" And the Apple watch is not the only device mentioned in this video (or transcript, if you prefer reading to listening)."

Then why is the title of the summary just "Apple Watch" instead of "Smart Watch"? Especially when there are already lots of non-Apple smart watches with motion sensing, heart rate monitoring, step counters, etc, already on peoples' wrists and have been for coming up on a year....

smart phone, not iphone
smart watch, not apple watch
tablet, not ipad
mp3 player, not ipod

>" Plus BIOS passwords can be worked around, jumpers, batteries, etc."

If designed properly, they would be no easier to work around than secureboot, itself. And still give control to the owner, not the OEM and not Microsoft.

>"The owner may not want to spend the time setting the password"

Freedom has a cost. It is not free, and it is not necessarily convenient.

>"One counterexample: The user of a computer is not necessarily the owner of a computer. For example a business may not want to allow an employee to disable secureboot."

Then the owner places a password protection on the BIOS and that prevents disabling secureboot, if that is their desire. I have no problem with password protection of the BIOS being strong. As long as the fate of the computer and its settings are in the hands of the owner.

>"And consider that the owner is not necessarily the user. In a business environment the company may not want users to disable secureboot."

That is easy to consider. The business can then lock the BIOS with a password to prevent the user from changing the secureboot status. And I have absolutely no problem with the BIOS password failure by the user doing nasty things like semi-bricking it until the OWNER unlocks it, or some other suitably difficult-to-circumvent design (like slicking the drives, or calling for help, or whatever).

The difference is that the OWNER is in control of the options set and used, not the OEM, not Microsoft.

>"Then buy a machine that was not built to be a dedicated Windows box. Motherboard vendors will continue to make boards where secureboot is absent or configurable. They already cater to the build-your-own and tweaking segments."

Are there boxes NOT built to be dedicated MS-Windows machines? How many are there? How about laptops? Last time I checked stores, there were exactly zero non-Apple machines that were sold that came without MS-Windows installed.

Consumers should not be be relegated to a very, very, very few models of computers, sold only online, and often without the features they want, just because they want the ability to turn off a simple feature in the BIOS that a convicted monopoly developed and wants to force down everyone's throats. There is absolutely no good reason secure boot should be locked on.

> Do you believe that jury duty also "goes against freedom"?

Right now, yes. But for a completely different reason... it is *NOT* mandatory for all citizens. It is only mandatory for those who are registered voters. And that is incredibly unfair.

>"No. The "solution" is to give all buyers the option of buying a machine with or without secureboot locked down. There is nothing wrong with a buyer preferring to get a factory locked down box if they so choose."

Yes there is. It doesn't make sense to offer a forced secureboot machine. Highly improbably any OEM is going to offer two of the same model. Either it will be unlocked or locked and not offered both ways (almost guarantee it). And if it is locked- it is "defective by design".

Plus most consumers don't know and won't know what secure boot is until it is too late. And they won't be told it anyway, and can't find out even if they want to know... it won't be on the box, or in manuals, or on the website or even with customer support. They might decide they need to run a utility or a different OS 6 months later and they are just screwed.

>"So Red Hat and Ubuntu establish relations with consumer hardware vendors and offer factory signed binaries. Linux is not doomed. Linux kernel developers need to be careful about their motherboards but the vast majority of Linux uses would be just fine."

And what about Mageia?
And what about FreeBSD?
And what about FreeDOS?
And what about VMWare VSX?
And what about that hard drive diagnostic disc?
And what about that RAID controller utility?
And what about any number of many dozens of OSes, utilities, and distros?

The "solution" is not to try and get everyone to play by the stupid secureboot "rules" that MS is trying to force on everyone. The solution is to have ALL machines give the owner of the machine the CHOICE to decide if they want secureboot on or off.

Microsoft saying it is "optional" means it absolutely won't be optional when they start putting behind-the-scenes (and probably illegal) pressure on the OEM's to start the lockdown.

This is still the wrong approach. The owner of the hardware should have the right to turn it off if they so choose. It should not be up to Microsoft. And it should not be up to the OEM. And it should not be up to carriers. And it should not be up to the government, either (might as well keep extending out the doom-and-gloom possibilities).

OEM's should listen to their customers and not Microsoft. Locking the bootloader is extremely anti-consumer and anti-competitive. The time to find out your machine is a paperweight should not be after you spent your hard-earned money buying a machine. When this whole fiasco started, there was ZERO transparency from the OEM's. You could not call Dell and ask if machine X had a locked secureboot, because the idiot support and sales people don't know. And it is not listed on the websites, the manuals, or the boxes.

>"gained control over Steve's account just by speaking to customer support and submitting a Photoshopped ID."

Are you sure it wasn't a "Gimped ID" or any number of other programs? Yeesh.

Hint: "photoedited" ID.

Mandatory voting is a hugely bad idea:

1) It goes against freedom
2) It encourages people to vote who have no idea (or less idea) what the issues are. This brings poorer choices and dilutes the votes of those who DO know what the issues are.
3) It encourages people to vote who apparently have no interest in the issues.

What we desperately need is the introduction of some form of preferential voting like instant runoff voting (and possibly the end of the electoral college). THAT would make a HUGE and PRODUCTIVE change in ways that really matter. We could then be free of being locked into a two-party race where both parties essentially suck. People could vote for who they want without fear they are throwing their vote away or fear of allowing someone they don't like getting elected because they didn't vote for the lesser of two evils.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.fairvote.org/reform...

WTF? You are the one insane...