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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

Does "Secure Boot" actually benefit the end user in any way what so ever? Genuine question

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.
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.
Yes, as long as you get the option to disable it. And use custom keys.
It's uh, more secure.
- I enrolled custom keys and bricked my motherboard 🙃
It prevents rootkit malware that loads before the OS and therefore is very difficult to detect. If enabled, it tells your machine to only load the OS if it's signed by a trusted key and hasn't been tampered with.
It's so secure that the first thing under Wikipedia's entry for Secure boot is Secure boot criticism
Yes this is a real, I'm not joking.
- It's not the first thing, it's in the middle.
You can set it to run only specifically signed binaries on boot.
- Specifically signed by anyone with a key - which, considering multiple where leaked over time - is everyone.

I had this problem at work a week ago or so, at least with Fujitsu PCs. For them, the main cause isn't an empty CMOS battery, but rather that Fujitsu generally had too little BIOS cache, since there is nothing about it in the UEFI standard. The update basically overfilled that cache, rendering the BIOS completely unusable. The POST doesn't even go through fully.

The PC are sort of bricked, you gotta put the mainboard into recovery mode, put the ROM file on a freeBSD formatted stick and wait until you see instructions on the screen. Follow them, restart the PC. I recommend setting the BIOS to the optimized default settings, as not doing that might make the boot of Windows pretty slow in some cases. I did hear that it can delete the keys from the TPM, but I haven't seen that with my PCs at work.

JFC

most competent Microsoft developer

You mean Bing AI
- David Plummer

I learned one morning that a cmos battery could become a resistor. It can fail in a way that it's not working nor completely dead but passes just enough current to make a server motherboard that otherwise might A: Work, B: detect it's dead/missing and boot anyway with defaults to instead C: just freeze and not do anything. That was a fun full day of time wasted.

When I was 12, I thought I had broken the family computer trying to get Ultima III to run. I read every MS-DOS manual I could find trying to fix it before someone found me out. It was the frikin CMOS battery. I learned a lot of DOS that summer.

What all am I looking at here? Or is this all meme?

It's a meme about how draining the cmos battery bricked some PC's, I think. It's formatted like the Wikipedia sidebar summary for articles on wartime battles.
Here for the replies
- It's a meme about how draining the cmos battery bricked some PC's, I think. It's formatted like the Wikipedia sidebar summary for articles on wartime battles.
You're in linuxmemes did you not expect a meme? xD
Also: Yes it's a meme based on a true story (see the other comments for more details)
The meme itself is based on https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/historical-battle-shitposts-decisive-victory

Wow what a super cool website without cookie opt-out.

Not only that, if you try to click any of the links, like the partner list or privacy statements, it takes you to another page with the same pop-up over it... So you have to accept the shit to read their disclosures... What a shitty website, unless the purpose was to keep the information a secret, then it works great because I sure as shit didn't read it.
The URL (borncity) has nothing to do with the topic (Windows Update), that's a sign of an SEO content farm
Well the website (and the guy maintaing it) is pretty old. I think the blog posts reach back till Windows Vista. The guy itself wrote some books about Win95 so he has some experience.
The site is quite popular in Germany and the information is usually good summarized and helpful IMHO.
Anyway as always I recommend an adblocker when using the internet.
Use Reader View in Firefox. I never accepted the cookies. 😉

I have a motherboard in a state where it won't boot unless you pull and reinsert the cmos battery. After this it will boot exactly once.

It will also boot without issue if you don't have a cmos battery at all. This is obviously not ideal.

I wonder if these issues are related? I purchased the motherboard second hand in this state about a year ago. So it is far too early for this update, but it remains a mystery.

Have you tried putting in a new battery?
- First thing I tried yeah, I tested a few and verified with a multi meter. It isn't that sadly :(
- Ain't nobody got time for that
I had something kiind of similar once, where it would only boot after trying to boot once, letting it run a bit in idle, and then rebooting where it would actually succeed. Turned out I forgot to put the clear cmos jumper back to neutral after i reset cmos.
So my best guess (other than new battery) is check the jumpers maybe
Y'know the setting in the bios where you can choose boot on power restore, stay off or last state? This relies on a capacitor on the motherboard near the bios battery to store the last state. This 5 cent capacitor can die and sometimes behave like you are saying. I had a repair guy fix it cheap and that server worked normally after that.

Allen&Heath sound controllers on Ubuntu had a funny failure too. It's touchscreen and extra screen would show nothing on boot although the sound controls (for one surface config) works. In order to fix that, you need a replacement battery, a keyboard to boot into it's BIOS and a password they don't disclose publicly. I revived a couple of these by a pure luck of discovering someone posting said passwords 5+ years ago. It's so hostile I hate it.

Wait... Microsoft is shit?!

But how many civilians cannibalized?

we prefer to classify that a 'charitably donated meals'
There are no civilians when profit is involved.

This feels like https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/unix_surrealism

I still get the shakes

What? The penguin bird is so fat that it is bigger than a window? Or... I know: "Stick penguin into hole!" But why? Nah... Hey, can somebody read ancient Egyptian?

Is this for real?

Yes, multiple of our Windows laptops today couldn't boot and displayed a BitLocker error message and all affected laptops somehow had an empty BIOS battery...
- Can it at least be fixed with a new battery? Or does that get drained quickly too?