Using the capital punishment symbol instead of the killed in action symbol suggests windows was executed after the war (likely by installing linux lol)
There are variations of the Skull and Crossbones here that have specific meaning?
On wikipedia, capital punishment is a skull and amd bones, killed in action is a christian cross
Thats kinda shitty its a cross. Like holding one religion above the others on a fucking encyclopedia.
It is not a Christian cross, the symbol is the dagger † which is also often used for adding post-scriptum information or challenging parts of a text.
People often mistake it for a cross, given the look, but there’s no actual preference towards any religion here.
The cross is an entirely different unicode character: ✝
Does “Secure Boot” actually benefit the end user in any way what so ever? Genuine question
For you? No. For most people? Nope, not even close.
However, it mitigates certain threat vectors both on Windows and Linux, especially when paired with a TPM and disk encryption. Basically, you can no longer (terms and conditions apply) physically unscrew the storage and inject malware and then pop it back in. Nor can you just read data off the drive.
The threat vector is basically ”our employees keep leaving their laptops unattended in public”.
(Does LUKS with a password mitigate most of this? Yes. But normal people can’t be trusted with passwords and need the TPM to do it for them. And that basically requires SecureBoot to do properly.)
That’s only one use of secure boot. It’s also supposed to prevent UEFI level rootkits, which is a much more important feature for most people.
With LUKS, your boot/efi partition is still unencrypted. So someone could install a malicious bootloader, and you probably wouldn’t know and would enter your password. With secure boot, the malicious bootloader won’t boot because it has no valid signature.
Well yes, assuming that:
- you trust the hardware manufacturer
- you can install your own keys (i.e. not locked by vendor)
- you secure your bios with a secure password
- you disable usb / network boot
With this you can make your laptop very tamper resistant. It will be basically impossible to tamper with the bootloader while the laptop is off. (e.g install keylogger to get disk-encryption password).
What they can do, is wipe the bios, which will remove your custom keys and will not boot your computer with secure boot enabled.
Something like a supply-side attack is still possible however. (e.g. tricking you into installing a malicious bootloader while the PC is booted)
Always use security in multiple layers, and to think about what you are securing yourself from.
