It also doesn’t appear that Mr. Garrett has made any tweets that acknowledge what’s going on in there.
I’ve reached out to Mr. Garrett on Techrights IRC to see if he has anything to say about why he’s still on a platform that is now 100% owned by a homophobe who is blaming gay people for the attack on Paul Pelosi (Quite an odd accusation, but when have conspiracy theories made sense lately?), which will now do pretty much nothing about far-right cranks.
I will note any reply I receive.
Musk later simply deleted the tweet, by which time it had over 24,000 shares and 89,000 likes.
No more masks or COVID tests for nursing home workers soon thanks to “Bailout Biden”.
I was on the phone with my mother in Indiana last night and learned something very troubling.
Mom informed me that very soon, they won’t have to test or wear masks at the nursing home she works at because “Bailout Biden”‘s Administration won’t be buying masks and COVID tests for people who have to work where the 90 and 100 year olds live.
Instead, he gave Intel $20 billion so they could fire all those thousands of people today instead of buying PPE for nurses.
On the vaccine front, whatever Fully Boosted even means anymore in Vaccine Choose Your Own Adventure, your guess is as good as mine I suppose.
So I think we need to give up on trying to suppress every mild case of illness and just try to keep the more extreme outcomes away, and figure out what the minimum number of doses that does this is. The fact that they’re seriously talking about “four boosters per year” is very alarming. So, we need to scrap this idea and go to something that’s actually tenable.
That’s what an ethical person would say to do.
Unfortunately, anti-Free Software troll Matthew J. Garrett had a bad episode last night on IRC to try to disrupt the room, and the topic changed to vaccines for a while to distract from chat about the criminal activities of one Bill Gates.
(Garrett may be working for Microsoft soon if his employer doesn’t go under before that. Their CEO is trying to get Aurora Innovation, Inc. acquired. It’s currently running out of money, losing three-fourths of a billion dollars a year on barely a tenth as much revenue, having never turned a profit.)
There’s no evidence that the vaccines shape the spread of COVID much.
That seems to have happened mainly from damned near everyone getting it at once last winter (look at the graphs) despite being vaxxed and boosted.
The reason we won’t see a surge on a graph again this winter won’t be because COVID’s not spreading, it’s because “Bailout Biden” scuttled the tests, even for nursing home workers, and all the money for the masks too.
It went to the Intel Bailout instead.
By that, I don’t mean literally went to Intel, but that Congress could have chosen to put the $20 billion into COVID supplies instead of a failing chip company making buggy processors for Windows PCs that nobody wants to buy. CHIPS Act was basically like the GM bailout, except I don’t even think Intel will last 10 more years.
The several thousand getting sacked are largely marketing and R&D. They’re keeping the managers to preside over a smaller cubicle farm with less stuff in the pipeline. This is insanity.
Meanwhile, rush hour gridlock is back in Chicago because instead of shutting down the offices with the expensive rent and $5,000 coffee machines, CEOs adopted a “quit working from home, get your shots, and come back, or don’t bother coming back” policy, and now the Democrat Party wants to turn all freeways in Chicago into Toll Roads.
It’s amazing that instead of putting a lid on COVID, saving money, and reducing traffic fatalities, it was decided instead to cause a surge of COVID with lots of expensive offices, by bringing rush hour back in the middle of a global energy crisis.
If “Bailout Biden” really wanted to help the climate and punish the Saudis for colluding with Vladimir Putin on oil production cuts, we’d go back to mandatory work from home and be done with a terrorist state dictating our policies in exchange for some oil.
I don’t really like the term “government corruption”, because when you try to point something out as being an example of government corruption, you make it sound like it’s the exception rather than the rule.
It would be more notable to try to point at any examples of government virtue, if any such examples were to exist.
“Today in a shocking and rare case of government incorruption….”, the news from a parallel universe could say,“Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago was caught funneling taxpayer funds intended to help police beat up the homeless and burn their belongings into public housing.
When pressed for a comment, Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois said ‘I’m shocked. Shocked and dismayed! And I vow, as your Governor who packed that ballot box fair and square, to get to the bottom of this incorruptibilityand alarming level of accountability involving taxpayer funds. This is exactly the kind of behavior that my Administration has been working very hard to root out here in the Prairie State.'”
It really does amaze me how obtuse Matthew Garrett can be when he wants to be. He tried to imply I was racist when I said people in Chicago are woke and the only reason Lori Lightfoot is the Mayor is because she’s a black lesbian.
I was saying that the “qualifications” aren’t the best policies, it’s ticking off boxes.
I said I’m gay and I wouldn’t want anyone to vote for me if it was only because I was gay. That’s not important. You have to worry about how they’ll run your city or state and affect your life.
I’ve passed up voting for two gay people (Lori Lightfoot and Pete Buttigieg) because I didn’t feel they were qualified to do what they were running for.
I don’t feel Pete Buttigieg should even be the Transportation Secretary. He had his “let them eat brioche” moment the other day when he said you’ll never worry about gas prices if you buy an electric car.
So many things wrong with that, like the fact that those cars are an unreliable burden with sky high maintenance costs and that California’s electric grid is on the verge of collapse and they already can’t beg, borrow, or steal enough of someone else’s electricity to run what they have now.
I say this because these crooked assholes actually had the nerve to bomb my email box this morning begging me to go vote for their candidates. Saying that “internal polling” shows they may actually lose the Illinois Supreme Court.
I already voted, for the Republican, Mark C. Curran.
If the Democrats keep up what they’re doing, the 40% surge in violent crime since Pritzker was elected in 2018 will look like a walk in the park.
I support knocking over the FOID Act and letting the people lock and load and shoot back if the police aren’t going to do anything.
(Three grams of fentanyl is enough to kill 1,500 people of a drug overdose. We do not need this bill in the middle of a drug crisis! This would benefit dealers, not people who are using.)
So I voted Republican for Sheriff too.
Illinois is giving up on having a justice system under the Democrats, and our state economy is almost unbelievably bad even by the abysmal standards of what’s left of this country.
Pritzker is bragging that we took out more loans to pay off loans from the Federal Reserve, that we in turn took out to cover his COVID spending, which honestly mostly had nothing to do with COVID anyway.
He’s spent the last two years with dictatorial powers and it’s time for that to stop. I doubt he gets voted out, but I voted to try to box him in. You do what you can.
Matthew Garrett’s employer, Aurora, is nearly valueless and looking to be acquired by Microsoft.
Matthew Garrett is the person who put Microsoft’s “Secure Boot” into GNU/Linux (which is designed to give Microsoft control over whether you can use a different OS on YOUR PC).
Almost like something from the Terran Empire Universe of Star Trek, the Free Software Foundation gave him an award for promoting Microsoft’s PC sabotage.
Garrett is a person who spends a lot of his free time essentially harassing Techrights, both in the IRC channel, and spouting what I feel is misleading information, outright lies, and negative propaganda about us on his Twitter account.
He works for a “self-driving” car company called Aurora Innovation, Inc.
We’re led to believe, according to Garrett, that he left Google (a stable company that makes money) to work at Aurora of his own volition.
Today I learned that Aurora is in deep shit.
This is what happened to their stock this year. Down nearly 80%.
I’d have to say it’s probably due to the recession and the rising interest rates at the Fed that investors are not in the mood to keep throwing money at this. Money that is getting a lot more expensive to borrow.
“It’s a scam,” says George Hotz, whose company Comma.ai Inc. makes a driver-assistance system similar to Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot. “These companies have squandered tens of billions of dollars.” […] Aurora Innovation Inc., a startup co-founded by Chris Urmson, Google’s former autonomous-vehicle chief, has lost more than 85% since last year and is now worth less than $3 billion. This September a leaked memo from Urmson summed up Aurora’s cash-flow struggles and suggested it might have to sell out to a larger company.
-Bloomberg Article
When I went to look up the share price to take a picture, the related news had the following, which appears to corroborate the Bloomberg story about the leaked memo, and says that Aurora is seeking a takeover from “Microsoft or Apple”.
A few months ago, I laughed and called self-driving cars a pipe dream.
I also said anyone working in this field should be keeping their résumé updated because nobody wants it and it doesn’t actually work.
Earlier in the Bloomberg story, it spoke of a woman in San Francisco that had to go to CBS news because Google’s Waymo cars kept breaking the law and using her driveway as a turnaround dozens of times a day.
Other “self-driving” car companies have had to pay out money for running over pedestrians and saying the software thought they were a shopping bag, and in many cases the owner of the car is held liable for doing stupid things like riding in the back seat while the Tesla runs into a parked police car.
There’s other examples, but the technology just obviously isn’t going anywhere soon.
“Security expert” Matthew Garrett blew up Windows on the laptop he’s been complaining about all week by enabling the Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA certificate, then says the Bitlocker Backdoor (for police) saved his data from the TPM.
My God, this guy couldn’t get better with a bag of chips.
I don’t even have to make much effort to blog about Matthew Garrett FAILs. All I have to do is screenshot the Nitter instance I use.
Essentially, what Garrett is saying is that when you enable Microsoft’s 3rd Party UEFI CA certificate, which is what the “shim” that enables “Security Theater Boot” to work on GNU/Linux, is signed with, that the TPM will refuse to decrypt your Bitlocker volumes. Not that this could be any sort of an inconvenience. Right?
The TPM freaking out is a problem I ran into when I applied an official Lenovo UEFI update for March of 2021 on my ThinkBook 15 ITL Gen2.
There was no warning that this was even possibly going to happen, just like it seems there was no warning on Garrett’s laptop that enabling that certificate would destroy Windows and cause data loss due to the TPM and Bitlocker.
Windows 10 Professional comes with Bitlocker enabled by default. In my case, I told it to delete my recovery key because I didn’t want Microsoft to have a copy to hand to the police if they came looking for whatever reason (I don’t know why they would.), and then I generated a new recovery key, and forgot to write it down before I applied Lenovo’s UEFI update, which tripped the TPM, and caused it to refuse to decrypt my files and ask me for a recovery key I didn’t have.
Not that I think it would help, because I also couldn’t make the keyboard work to type anything anyway.
I ended up losing all files that weren’t backed up, which thankfully wasn’t many, and using my 2016 laptop to make a GNU/Linux live installer and wipe Windows off the disk permanently. That turned out to be the kick I needed to get me to stop playing around with shit-ass Windows again.
Since “Secure Boot” is worthless, you should just turn it off permanently and then wipe Windows from the disk.
Of course, back to Bitlocker…. If Microsoft has your decryption key, they can be compelled to give it to the police, which makes it a backdoor that they admit to having. There very well can be others that they don’t admit to having.
But if you use Windows at all, the Telemetry, Windows Defender, and Smartscreen are telling them all of the stuff on your computer anyway, and all of your keystrokes. So if you have anything you’re not supposed to have, they can tell law enforcement, and then get themselves compelled to hand over your decryption recovery key if it is in your Microsoft account. Due to being the default, it almost certainly is.
Then you may be in court with your life ruined spending your last pennies on a lawyer in some last ditch effort to stay out of prison.
Matthew Garrett, which slipped Microsoft restricted-boot into GNU/Linux, is making noise about Lenovo locking GNU/Linux out of a laptop after accusing me of “spewing nonsense” for taking action against them for far worse.
In 2016, I took to Reddit and the news media after buying a Lenovo Yoga 900-ISK2 laptop. I bought it because I read a blog post praising how well it ran GNU/Linux after you wiped the godawful Windows 10 OS from it.
Unfortunately, what I didn’t know is that Lenovo did a mid-cycle refresh in late 2016 because the original Intel HD 520 graphics chip was a real slug and could barely run a HiDPI display at its native resolution, thus requiring them to replace it mid-year with a Iris 540, which was roughly 40% faster.
(And even then, it was nothing to write home about. Maybe some games from 2012 running in 720p worked, but asking for more than that from it was too much. I shudder to think what the 520 was like!)
As part of this “upgrade”, Lenovo also refreshed their UEFI firmware, and in the process they put the disk storage controller into a secret undocumented mode that Linux couldn’t use, making it appear as though there was no Solid State Drive in the laptop.
The code to enable AHCI mode was there, but Lenovo also wrote new code to reset it to the secret storage controller mode on every reboot even if you reset it from UEFI shell.
Someone on Lenovo Forums (from which Lenovo banned me 9 different times to try to shut me up) hooked up an external flasher and showed that the option to persistently set AHCI mode was still there and could be re-enabled, but you couldn’t do it with the official firmware flasher program because the firmware wouldn’t allow unsigned images to be flashed if it was running and could prevent it.
Eventually, Lenovo and Matthew Garrett attacked me in public and the pro-Microsoft media ran with it. Lenovo also put out some idiotic article about how their laptop had a 360 degree hinge that was designed for Windows 10 and wouldn’t work with “Linux”, only it did work fine in GNOME, and better than Windows.
(Windows often didn’t bring up the on screen keyboard, because it could only respond and do that with the very few built-in apps that were tablet-mode compatible, such as Edge.)
Mr. Garrett took a different approach than Lenovo to attack me, implying that I was hysterical and that they locked GNU/Linux out “so the laptop would get good battery life”, except that wasn’t the case.
The laptop, new, ran for 4.5 hours from 100% to dead on Windows 10. It just had piss poor battery life on Windows 10. It was completely pathetic. Garrett doesn’t know what he was talking about. I don’t think he even had one of these things.
If you ran GNU/Linux and used powertop’s autotune as a system service, it ran for about 7 hours. Nearly twice as long. After some additional work on the Linux kernel, I think the system eventually was getting like 8-9 hours. So there was room for improvement in Linux at the time, but Windows battery life was a total disaster. Compared to Linux, with Windows you unplugged from the wall and ZIP…dead.
All along, Mr. Garrett has always come up with “reasons” why there is no “conspiracy”. It’s always just some “bug” or they “don’t care” if Linux works, it’s never anything malicious you know.
So this year, with Microsoft’s new Pluton “security” system, the Windows 11 requirements change again. Vendors are required to disable the “Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA” certificate, which is what Mr. Garrett’s jury-rigged “Secure” Boot implementation was relying on in order to work at all.
So now it doesn’t work anymore and he finally criticizes them, mildly.
Better late than never, I guess, but at this point there can be no misunderstanding about the direction Microsoft and their OEM crime partners are heading.
In 2016, I filed an antitrust complaint against Lenovo with the state government of Illinois, which opened an investigation. I believe I still have most of the documents about that. They entered into a settlement agreement with me in which they agreed to release “non-official” firmware that was “Linux-compatible” and arrange to knock it off on their future laptops, in exchange for me dropping my complaint.
Yet here we are in 2022, and I suppose they haven’t technically violated that agreement, however, as you can still run the firmware in a non-default configuration in two ways to get GNU/Linux to load on an affected system. Apparently, there’s an option to re-enable the 3rd party Microsoft key in the UEFI setup, or you can just go in there and turn Secure Boot to “Disabled”.
Linux boots either way on my Lenovo ThinkBook 15 ITL Gen2, which was Ubuntu certified (I am currently writing this in Fedora 36 and pleased as punch with the way my computer is operating.), but I turned off “Secure Boot”. There have been numerous issues with it, since it was designed by shitheads and implemented clumsily on GNU/Linux by another one who even got a Free Software Award for doing so, but when it is off you don’t run into any problems with it and you don’t have to figure out how to administer it and what to do when an OS fucks up something called a “dbx” that I don’t even want to read about.
The whole system sucks. It is over-designed and full of bugs, and even assuming the user had any meaningful and straightforward way of controlling it that was guaranteed to be there (they don’t), more points of failure can only cause more breakdowns in any system.
We’ve seen cases where people just left “Secure” Boot on because that’s what OEMs and people like Garrett recommend to do, and if they boot this OS or that OS in the wrong order, or load Windows, then their other operating systems can become quite unusable without going in there and resetting everything to factory settings and turning it off anyway.
“Secure” Boot is a disaster waiting for a time and place to happen if you leave it on and for most users, especially ones that use competently designed operating systems, it brings nothing good to the table.
I’m just crazy and want my computer to load what I tell it to.
And I’m not even the first one to notice Lenovo and their insane defaults, btw.
In 2012(?), Mr. Garrett himself blogged on whatever he was using back then that there was a Lenovo laptop that only booted if the boot manager was called “Windows” or “Red Hat Enterprise Linux”, and I don’t think they ever fixed that.
In a response to his Twitter complaint about the current Lenovo debacle, people have noted that some Lenovo laptops don’t make any sense at all. One guy says he bought a Carbon X1 Gen10 and found Secure Boot and Virtualization (needed for other alleged Windows 11 “security”) turned off by default.
My laptop’s Lenovo firmware setup program has typos and Engrish all over the place. Fedora hides the complaints about firmware bugs that get printed to the screen by the Linux kernel. Debian doesn’t.
There’s a couple things to note about Lenovo, Microsoft’s “OEM Partner of the Year”. They’re incompetent and they’re nasty.
On TechRights IRC recently, Roy Schestowitz says he got his wife a Lenovo laptop years back and it’s been beeping about overheating for several years now, but never seems to just go ahead and fail.
I had to disassemble the Yoga 900 ISK2 to replace the keyboard module and battery a couple of years ago due to missing keys and battery wear, but it still works.
I’m just playing it by ear at this point. I keep hoping someone will build a PC that doesn’t suck, but I may also have to consider that my next computer may very well not be a PC. It certainly won’t be a PC if I can’t remove Windows from it, which I don’t want and never asked for, and would have declined if I had the option to be billed separately and take it or leave it.
Every year, Windows loses about 2 more percentage points of the desktop/laptop market, sometimes level for a year or two and then drastically down.
Like all of a sudden with the Russian-Ukraine war or Coronavirus recession….if anything good comes out of the coming recession, maybe Windows will dip again and have a bad year….seems their most dire numbers are coming from Pornhub’s statistics, but I have no reason not to trust that.
The more people who quit using Windows, the more will learn that they don’t need it anyway, and won’t come back when times are better. It’s best that Microsoft dies or becomes mostly irrelevant sooner rather than later, so there will be less of a mess to clean up.
Locking the door may influence where people go, but not that they will leave. Maybe they’ll buy a Mac or a Chromebook. Maybe they’ll use GNU/Linux on those. Maybe they’ll finally just buy a cheap ARM laptop and use GNU/Linux on that. It doesn’t take a lot to run it well.
x86 PCs are real gas guzzlers when it comes to power.
They need a lot of power and a lot of performance just to keep traction when it comes to Windows because it wastes so much of what the hardware resources could otherwise be doing, with bloat and spyware.
Why would Microsoft care? It can just train you to spend thousands trying to overcome it.
Most people are shocked to learn that a cheap $199 Chromebook feels faster than a $1,200 Windows PC. They shouldn’t be.
It’s the same concept as a lighter car with a small turbocharged engine being faster than a big gas guzzler with an engine twice as big.
As for Matthew Garrett, I think maybe he fears being exposed as a liar.
All these years he said Microsoft had no intention of locking out “Linux” with “Secure” Boot, and now they move it all to a non-default configuration with toggles that will obviously be removed 3-5 years from now when legacy Microsoft products that need them go end of life.
In the default configuration, his Jury Rigged solution doesn’t work anymore.
Maybe he believed that he made things better by implementing it? I doubt it. I really do doubt it.
Notice that he never mentions me, because he doesn’t like me. He considers himself to be in some sort of feud with me because I just don’t think he’s a very well balanced individual, honestly. But here’s the article he cited, and you can very clearly see it was me that Adrian Kingsley-Hughes cited, and specifically my post on Reddit.
(I was later banned from /r/linux after it was completely taken over by Microsoft trolls.)
Lenovo support admitting that they locked out other operating systems on the Yoga 900-ISK2 on orders from Microsoft. In 2016.
Here’s some screenshots from the case I filed with the Attorney General of Illinois in 2016, which got their attention and finally got them to agree to solve it. I also got a letter from the Attorney General in hard copy that’s tucked away that includes the particulars of the settlement we reached with Lenovo. They didn’t admit wrongdoing, but agreed to fix the issue.
As you can see, other than Lenovo spelling Illinois wrong in their internal email system before reaching out to me, Lenovo did get contacted by the State of Illinois and it panicked them. Had they not fixed the system, the state may have opened an antitrust investigation, so they hurried up and did whatever they needed to behind-the-scenes to get permission from Microsoft to unlock the computer.
This is all evidence that Matthew Garrett is incorrect when he states that Lenovo simply bungled this because they didn’t care or that it had something to do with “power management” (LOL). Here we have Lenovo admitting in public that there was a Microsoft deal to lock the system, and then here we also have them e-mailing me asking if I’ve had time to look at their updated BIOS that unlocks the computer, so that I could talk to the State government again.
Six years later, we have Matthew Garrett on Twitter:
As you can see from Lenovo’s documentation, like I stated before, you can enable the Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA, but a better solution is to just toggle “Secure Boot” to “Off” and never worry about it again.
At least until Microsoft changes their minds again and it’s some other song and dance, or you really have no choice but to use Windows if that’s what it came with. Again, I give this like maybe 5 years before we’re there.
Lenovo claims there isn’t anything special about Microsoft Pluton, which is what they’re calling Microsoft’s latest pretend security.
(Windows is a security shithole where virtually all computer malware that exists resides.)
Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. What is clear is that the Free Software community needs to be ready for that day with credible alternatives that can run GNU/Linux because the days of buying cheap commodity PCs with Windows, going “Ughh, this again!” but at least being able to wipe the disk of it, are likely numbered.
For what it’s worth, I’d like to remind everyone that I was taking legal action six years ago to buy the Free Software community some time, and all I ever got in thanks for it was essentially slandered by people like Matthew Garrett, who deserves at least to have Richard Stallman step in and revoke his Free Software Award, and booted out of /r/linux by the cancel mob of Microsoft moles who are there pitching Microsoft’s Fake Linux system, WSL.
Again, I don’t know what happened with Garrett. He’s always been Microsoft’s huckleberry. I don’t know what happened to him this week.
BaronHK's Rants 
You must be logged in to post a comment.