*countable infinities only

[Jay Sulzberger]

On Mon, 25 Jun 2012, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> (I'm posting in this thread rather than starting a new one in order to
> respect people who've spam-canned it)
> 
> It is being widely reported that Canonical's be signing the kernel,
> they won't be requiring signed drivers, and won't be restricting
> runtime functionality while securebooted. What is being claimed is
> that the only thing they'll be restricting is the bootloader and
> they're going to write a new bootloader for this in order to avoid
> signing code written by third parties.
> 
> This seems a bit incongruent with many of the claims made here about
> the degree of participation with cryptographic lockdown required and
> the importance of it.
> 
> I feel like the entire discussion has been a bit unfair where people
> were repeatedly challenged to offer alternatives when things claimed
> to be impossible based on NDAed discussions are, apparently, actually
> possible and the remaining weak alternatives were discarded as not
> being usable enough.

The main error of the Surrender before Engagement Argument is:

1. to implicitly assume that the "issue" is smaller than it is

The situation is quite different:

If we do not here and now stand and fight, likely we will shortly
lose the right to own a computer.

The issue is so large that it is absurd to allow a small group of
engineers from Fedora to engage in secret negotiations with the
Englobulators about the issue.  The small team is not empowered
by me, nor by millions of others, to give away our present
practical power to install Fedora on a new x86 home computer by
putting in a CD, and setting some values in some configuration
files.

As of today Red Hat has formally agreed that Microsoft should be
given an absolute veto power over ease of installation of a free
OS on almost all x86 home computer sold, starting within six months.

oo--JS.


> 
> 
> [1] http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Canonical-details-Ubuntu-UEFI-Secure-Boot-plans-1624444.html