News for nerds. Stuff that matters. Never mind if it's 14 months old.
That third sentence should be added to the slogan which Slashdot, the American technology news aggregation site, uses on its website. It would be stating the truth.
On December 29, the site had a headline "Free Software Foundation Campaigning To Stop UEFI Secure Boot". It was based on an article of the same date, from a site called Parity News.
The article neglected to mention the fact that the campaigning by the FSF actually began on October 12 last year. Slashdot did not provide this bit of perspective either.
Exactly what the connection is between Parity News and Slashdot is unknown, but a number of half-baked articles on the site have been linked to in recent days.
The only thing new about the FSF campaign it that it has now managed to garner 40,000 signatures. This is not a large number when an organisation has run a campaign on the web for 14 months. It is actually bad news.
On top of that, it turns out that the Slashdot story was wrong. The FSF is not campaigning to stop secure boot; rather it wants secure boot under user control. Thus Parity News has egg on its face as well.
The Parity News article also claims that the Linux Foundation recently released "a minimal UEFI SecureBoot preloader" (whatever that is) to enable users to install Linux on hardware that has secure boot enabled.
News for misinformed nerds would better reflect the reality.
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A professional journalist with decades of experience, Sam for nine years used DOS and then Windows, which led him to start experimenting with GNU/Linux in 1998. Since then he has written widely about the use of both free and open source software, and the people behind the code. His personal blog is titled Irregular Expression.
