14 DAY TRIAL // Dr. Richard Stallman, one of the most influential and important people in the Linux community, founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, has spoken openly about the dangers of UEFI.
In an interview for bytesmedia.co.uk, Dr. Richard Stallman has outlined that UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) or more commonly known as secure boot, is a danger for all Linux/GNU distributions, with the possible exceptions of Ubuntu and Fedora.
“What secure boot does is that it causes the machine to only work with programs that are signed with a certain key, your keys. And as long as the user controls which keys they are, then it’s a security feature."
"However, it can be chained into a set of digital handcuffs when the user doesn’t control the keys. And this [is] happening,” Dr. Stallman said.
Moreover, the president of the Free Software Foundation has said that ARM computers sold for Windows 8 will be set up in such a way that users will be unable to change the keys. He considers this to be an abuse and it should be illegal.
So far, it seems that Microsoft is having its way with UEFI, and they will probably manage to implement it in USA, but in Europe they are going to have one hell of a fight.