Ultimate PC security requires UEFI -- and Windows 8 or Linux

Quoting:It's far easier to write malware that can brick your computer than the code contained in the average Trojan horse, worm, or virus. All it takes is random garbage code or zeros to overwrite the code in your BIOS -- child's play in the hacker world.

Overly exaggerated and simplistic? This guy is a paid "security advisor"?

Quoting:I want to be clear that this article and every comment I post here is independent of my full-time employer, Microsoft. Everything written and posted are my personal opinions and as an independent writer for InfoWorld.

The quoted disclaimer in one of his comments tells it all.

The most entertaining aspect of that article - for me - was watching Mr. Microsoft Security Advisor get punched in the face repeatedly in the comments. If facts were actual blows to the head, he'd be in the ER.

Love it... He was being just SO abused in the comments (deservedly so)... And some of the comments highlighted the fact that UEFI secure boot can be a pain to deactivate. On my Dell laptop, I ultimately had to enable legacy BIOS booting to prevent the machine from locking up every other time it was booted (no dual boot,... Win8 was wiped from the drive 20 minutes after first boot).

I had an issue with my home desktop locking up on boot half the time with Ubuntu Studio 12.04. It is a UEFI based machine, but it doesn't have secure boot. The new Linux kernel in 12.10, however, works perfectly and never locks up.

Well, I want an LTS version on my machines,... so 12.10 is out... Plus, I use Kubuntu, not Ubuntu. And Kubuntu is out of official status after 12.04... And it's really your bootloader as opposed to anything else that really determines whether you can use UEFI secure boot in a given distro... For me, all this means turning "secure boot" off...

Ubuntu Studio has never been directly supported by Canonical. It has the same status as Kubuntu does now (or Xubuntu or Lubuntu). It is now based on Xfce.

I wasn't suggesting that you should upgrade to 12.10. I was just pointing out that the issue may be related to UEFI and the kernel version. If so, that issue will be addressed by future updates, and is not surprising as part of the 'growing pains' of a new technology. Not being too down on UEFI, though is not the same as supporting Secure Boot. I agree that, at least for the time being, that should just be turned off on most Windows 8 certified machines, unless the owner actually wants to run only the original Windows 8 installation.

Quoting:The new Linux kernel in 12.10, however, works perfectly and never locks up.

Aren't they backporting UEFI fixes to the 12.04 kernels?

Maybe you could grab a 12.10-era kernal from a PPA.

When I started running Debian Squeeze on new hardware in 2010, new kernels -- first from Liquorix, then from Debian Backports -- made the experience much better.

If I want certain packages to run without incident on my systems (HTPC stuff, mostly), that means I can't get too crazy with what kernel versions I'm running. I have neither time nor inclination to hunt down potentially broken hardware support. Nope,... for now, on the limited amount of new hardware I have, secure boot is turned off, and legacy boot support is turned on... problems solved. K-I-S-S philosophy.

Crom, I wish I could get paid for stuff like this.

Paid for what part of it, exactly?