Re: The Achilles Heel Of Secure Boot: Certificate Revocation

Nuno Silva <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 2026-07-17, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> 
>> Oregonian Haruspex  <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>That's just sad and pitiful.  It's like buying the car you saw on 
>>>TV, not knowing they make more than one car.  How could anybody not 
>>>know basic computer stuff by now?
>>
>> Fewer computer users today know basic operational stuff than they 
>> did twenty years ago.  Making computers "easier to use" by obscuring 
>> what happens inside the box has lead to a generation or more of 
>> users who don't actually care.
>> --scott
> 
> I can't help but think that Windows 4 PCs from last century are 
> better than Android devices because at least you're able to do things 
> Android installs often bar you from doing.
> 
> Google reportedly wants to require ID verification to develop for 
> Android.

They "claim" it is for "security" reasons.  That's likely the 
/secondary/ reason, but is used publicly.  The real reason is that 
Doubleclick likely wants all those ID's so that later they can impose 
some "fee" on the developers.

> Now maybe if they instead required manufacturers not to make 
> applications uninstallable or even impossible to disable...  What the 
> shit is this.

The advertising company Doubleclick sold "ad slots" to the hardware 
makers for those "forced apps" -- so naturally the makers want, as 
their side of the bargan for paying for the slot, to prevent you the 
user from removing the apps.  Reason being that 99% of users will 
simply use "whatever is already installed when they open the box" and 
that means the "Company X browser" or "Company X dialer" -- which 
behind the scenes is shipping off all kinds of useful data to "Company 
X" so "Company X" can sell that data to other advertisers for ad 
targeting purposes.

> Even if I wanted to use Windows NT, I'd usually be able to
> grab drivers and do a clean install on a machine that came with a load
> of questionable stuff preinstalled.

Win NT grew up before the advertising companies (Doubleclick) had found 
the fire hose of sellable data from monitoring users full time, and so 
the evil of advertising had not fully permeated the old Win NT 
installs.  Yes, those "pre-installed" apps on a new machine were 
usually paid slots, but none of the purchasers nor sellers had fallen 
upon the idea of "prevent user from removing the applications" as a way 
to gain greater total usage.

It also helped that the mini-tablet market (Android/Iphone) began life 
on hardware that was locked down from the start to prevent users from 
making any changes to it that were not approved by the actual owners 
(the makers).