I still hope that one of these days people in general will realize that executable signing and SecureBoot are specifically designed for controlling what a normal person can run, rather than for anything resembling real security. The premises of either of those "mitigations" make absolutely no sense for personal computers.
I don't know about executable signing, but in the embedded world SecureBoot is also used to serve the customer; id est provide guarantees to the customer that the firmware of the device they receive has not been tampered with at some point in the supply chain.
And what if that customer wants to run their own firmware, ie after the manufacturer goes out of business? "Security" in this case conveniently prevente that.
There's a good reason everyone calls them microslop these days. The sooner we're all able to ditch this crappy company, the better - they're actively holding back the tech industry at this point
Yea, I'm in the process of converting our complete ETL infrastructure from SSIS/SQL Server to Python/PostgreSQL. Next step is Office 365, which will be more difficult, but doable since we are a small company anyway.
Outside of work, I don't use Windows very often if at all. I have a 2017 laptop that Microsoft made, and it is so damn sluggish for absolutely no reason, its VERY VERY vanilla mind you.
To be fair, the tech industry been holding itself back for decades now too, since lots of people seemingly have somewhat low prices to go from being a FOSS evangelist to wearing a "Microsoft <3 Open Source" t-shirt.
i remember years and years ago learning some posix/shell syntax and working in terminal. felt like my love for windows unraveled in real time. these days using windows... feel like i gotta take a shower after. like many i was just raised on windows it was the household operating system i had like 20 years of general computer usage under my belt on windows before i finally felt a mac trackpad for the first time. that hardware experience alone was the first pillar kicked out upholding my "windows is the best" philosophies. then i got into coding, then i tripped and fell out of hourly boeing slave labor into a sql job (lost 55% yearly income, no regrets yo). then i started discovering the open source world, and learned just how much computing goes on outside of the world of windows and how many insanely bright minds are out there contributing to... not microsoft. now i have linux and macos machines everywhere, i still haven't found the bottom but the last 6-7 years or so have been a really rich journey.
currently have a 32bit win xp env spun up in 86box just to compile a project in some omega old visual studio dotnet 7 and the service pack update at the time (don't ask). it is seriously _wild_ being in there, feels like stepping into a time machine. nostalgia aside, the OS is for the most part... quiet. doesn't bother you, everything is kind of exactly where you expect it to be, no noise in my start menu, there isnt some omega bing network callstack in my explorer, no prompts to o365 my life up.
it feels kinda sad, what an era that was. it's just more annoying to do any meaningful work in windows these days.
im currently working with c/cpp the idiot way (nothing about my story is ever conventional sigh), by picking a legacy project from like 22 years ago. this has forced me to step back into old redhat 7.1+icc5, old windows xp + dotnet7 like i explained above, and im definitely taking the most unpragmatic approach ever diving in here.. but there's one thing that absolutely sticks out to me: microsoft has always tried to capitalize on everything. tool? money. vendor lock. os? money. vendor lock. entire industries/education system capture? lotta money. lotta vendor lock. lotta generational knowledge lock.
they are lucky people are still using github. theyve tried to poke the bear a few times and theyre slowly but surely enshittifying the place, but im just kinda losing any reverence for microsoft altogether. microsoft has been big for a hot minute now, they have their eras. you can feel when things are driven by smart visionary engineers working behind the scenes, and you can tell when things are in pure slop mode microservice get rich or die trying mode. yea, microsoft has.. always been vendor-lock aggro and kinda hostile, but the current era microsoft is by far the grossest it's ever been. see: microsoft teams (inb4 "i use teams every day, i dont have a problem with it")
you can always either disable secureboot and driver signature verification, or (the better solution) just enroll your own certificate in your TPM and sign the driver with that...
Ah, yes, the [insert super inconvenient and complex thing to do that most people don’t know, want or should do] will solve it! And when that fails, surely the user can just write their own OS, right? Bunch of skill-issued complainers we the users are.
Well, the hope was always that those of us inconvenienced by M$ would all collectively contribute to making Linux distros more convenient for everyone. But we can't ever seem to get inconvenienced enough to actually sufficiently mobilize and/or coordinate such an effort.
I still hope that one of these days people in general will realize that executable signing and SecureBoot are specifically designed for controlling what a normal person can run, rather than for anything resembling real security. The premises of either of those "mitigations" make absolutely no sense for personal computers.
I don't know about executable signing, but in the embedded world SecureBoot is also used to serve the customer; id est provide guarantees to the customer that the firmware of the device they receive has not been tampered with at some point in the supply chain.
And what if that customer wants to run their own firmware, ie after the manufacturer goes out of business? "Security" in this case conveniently prevente that.
There's a good reason everyone calls them microslop these days. The sooner we're all able to ditch this crappy company, the better - they're actively holding back the tech industry at this point
Yea, I'm in the process of converting our complete ETL infrastructure from SSIS/SQL Server to Python/PostgreSQL. Next step is Office 365, which will be more difficult, but doable since we are a small company anyway.
Are you converting the SSIS automatically somehow or rewriting it?
Outside of work, I don't use Windows very often if at all. I have a 2017 laptop that Microsoft made, and it is so damn sluggish for absolutely no reason, its VERY VERY vanilla mind you.
They have been holding back the tech industry for decades now.
To be fair, the tech industry been holding itself back for decades now too, since lots of people seemingly have somewhat low prices to go from being a FOSS evangelist to wearing a "Microsoft <3 Open Source" t-shirt.
Looking at the rest of the tech industry in 2026 that might be a blessing.
i remember years and years ago learning some posix/shell syntax and working in terminal. felt like my love for windows unraveled in real time. these days using windows... feel like i gotta take a shower after. like many i was just raised on windows it was the household operating system i had like 20 years of general computer usage under my belt on windows before i finally felt a mac trackpad for the first time. that hardware experience alone was the first pillar kicked out upholding my "windows is the best" philosophies. then i got into coding, then i tripped and fell out of hourly boeing slave labor into a sql job (lost 55% yearly income, no regrets yo). then i started discovering the open source world, and learned just how much computing goes on outside of the world of windows and how many insanely bright minds are out there contributing to... not microsoft. now i have linux and macos machines everywhere, i still haven't found the bottom but the last 6-7 years or so have been a really rich journey.
currently have a 32bit win xp env spun up in 86box just to compile a project in some omega old visual studio dotnet 7 and the service pack update at the time (don't ask). it is seriously _wild_ being in there, feels like stepping into a time machine. nostalgia aside, the OS is for the most part... quiet. doesn't bother you, everything is kind of exactly where you expect it to be, no noise in my start menu, there isnt some omega bing network callstack in my explorer, no prompts to o365 my life up.
it feels kinda sad, what an era that was. it's just more annoying to do any meaningful work in windows these days.
im currently working with c/cpp the idiot way (nothing about my story is ever conventional sigh), by picking a legacy project from like 22 years ago. this has forced me to step back into old redhat 7.1+icc5, old windows xp + dotnet7 like i explained above, and im definitely taking the most unpragmatic approach ever diving in here.. but there's one thing that absolutely sticks out to me: microsoft has always tried to capitalize on everything. tool? money. vendor lock. os? money. vendor lock. entire industries/education system capture? lotta money. lotta vendor lock. lotta generational knowledge lock.
they are lucky people are still using github. theyve tried to poke the bear a few times and theyre slowly but surely enshittifying the place, but im just kinda losing any reverence for microsoft altogether. microsoft has been big for a hot minute now, they have their eras. you can feel when things are driven by smart visionary engineers working behind the scenes, and you can tell when things are in pure slop mode microservice get rich or die trying mode. yea, microsoft has.. always been vendor-lock aggro and kinda hostile, but the current era microsoft is by far the grossest it's ever been. see: microsoft teams (inb4 "i use teams every day, i dont have a problem with it")
They should have also picked up that WireGuard Creator account also got his account terminated
heh the same company that controls your secure boot chain just killed the signing account for the tool that encrypts your disk
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47686549
Thanks, the previous title was easy to miss: "Veracrypt project update"
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47686549
With Windows, you get what you pay for.
In this case, that's an OS controlled by an unaccountable company that can take application software away from you.
Related: If you're the customer, you're the product.
Hmmm, so basically Google but you also pay for it?
ChromeOS and Android are definitely comparable.
Windows actually isn't very cheap.
I see what you did there.
you can always either disable secureboot and driver signature verification, or (the better solution) just enroll your own certificate in your TPM and sign the driver with that...
Ah, yes, the [insert super inconvenient and complex thing to do that most people don’t know, want or should do] will solve it! And when that fails, surely the user can just write their own OS, right? Bunch of skill-issued complainers we the users are.
Well, the hope was always that those of us inconvenienced by M$ would all collectively contribute to making Linux distros more convenient for everyone. But we can't ever seem to get inconvenienced enough to actually sufficiently mobilize and/or coordinate such an effort.
> or (the better solution) just enroll your own certificate in your TPM and sign the driver with that...
I'll tell Grandma that's what she needs to do.
Make sure that she setup a PKI infrastructure to manage certificate revocation as well, wouldn't want a bad grandson to mess with it.
And they say Linux is inconvenient because you have to open the terminal every once in a while.