Oh, but I’m a crazy conspiracy theorist when I tell people something like this almost certainly exists…!

… god fucking damnit.

Yeah. Yeah this is what the TPMv2 push was for.

This is why dual booting is always impossible in practice, because Windows can rewrite the boot sector, whenever it wants, and the Pluton system allows Windows to have an effectively below ring 0 level of access to the kernel, and… you cannot audit this.

https://en.ittrip.xyz/windows11/pluton-firmware-event

Windows 11: Bonus Combo Bundle with unremovable NSA rootkit!

Its for your health!

… they never needed to do this, it makes and it made no sense to throw away so much goodwill/reputation by just declaring the vast majority of the worlds pcs are now e-waste, upgrade to our new hardware standard for secure computing!

The only explanation that could ever make sense was that they wanted total control. Because its insane brand suicide from a purely capitalistic pov, the juice is not worth that hard of a squeeze.

Fucking… Windows is malware, by the FBI’s own guidelines for that from not too many years back.

… they just applied the same approach they did to making Xboxes non hard-moddable… to all PC hardware.

Make it so the system physically cannot function if you remove or even poke the part you’d need to poke or remove, once it has their software on it.

People think the Israeli pager thing was a well done supply chain attack.

… MSFT invented this shit.

Used to work for em, had a veteran co worker tell me about the one time he got deployed to Saudi Arabia to flash the bios of hardware destined to be installed in Saddam’s CnC/Air Defense systems.

And that was for Gulf War 1, by the way.

As far as I know, that is still fucking classified, because I’ve never heard anyone else talk about that, anywhere, ever.

… fuck.

Doesn’t matter now, I guess.