We have brought you the potential perils of the upcoming UEFI Forum-implemented - www.uefi.org - Windows 8 secure boot feature here, here and here. However, it appears that it may not be so 'secure' after all, since there appears to be a surefire way to circumvent it, at least for the moment, while it's in development.

Softpedia has scored an exclusive interview with security researcher Peter Kleissner, who has created various Windows (XP, Server 2003 etc) "bootkits", which allow OS infection at the highest privilege level, giving unrestricted access to the whole of the PC. His latest one, called Stoned Lite, shows how the Windows 8 secure boot process, still in development, can be subverted, as it stands. He is planning to release details of how the code works at the upcoming International Malware Conference (MalCon) - malcon.org - that will take place in India on November 25th. It appears that the real vulnerability exists in the legacy BIOS boot procedure, not in Microsoft's implementation of secure boot, as Kleissner said:

The problem with the legacy startup is that no one verifies the MBR, which makes it the vulnerable point. With UEFI and secure boot, all the boot applications and drivers have to be signed (otherwise they won't be loaded). You can compare it to TPM, although Arie van der Hoeven from Microsoft announced that the secure boot feature is mandatory for OEMs who want to be UEFI certified. It is a good message that security is not an option.

In an attempt to empower millions of students across the country, Indian Government agencies have formulated plans to release a laptop at prices that equal that of a trip to a pizzeria in the west. Under a Government-sponsored scheme that runs parallel to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) global initiative, the administration sought to implement this scheme to make the computer up to 10 times more affordable than an OLPC. The Government believes that the hidden costs involved in deploying laptops under the OLPC scheme make it still inaccessible to the larger student population, and that much better hardware could be provided at its cost.

The first thing that comes to your mind would probably be the kind of hardware that would make such a cheap laptop. Earliest data trickling in about the specifications indicates each laptop to have about 2 GB of memory, and support wireless networking. We will attempt to find out more about the hardware in the days to come. The Indian Government has reportedly spent close to US $1.5 billion on developing this concept and researching solutions to make this notebook durable and worthy of deployment to the most remote rural areas, that suffer power-outages and voltage fluctuations. Higher Education Secretary R.P. Agrawal said last week that it would be available within six months. The public education scheme governing the deployment of these laptops was flagged off today, in the southern-Indian city of Tirupati. The laptop will be available to students on a priority basis, and will later reach mass-retail channels in the country.

IBM will be supplying the US Government with two new supercomputers for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to handle analysis of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The first is a 500 teraflops supercomputer called the BlueGene/P which the lab will receive by April, the second being the 20 Petaflops supercomputer which is due by 2012. It is estimated to perform up to 10 times greater than the current most powerful systems. More information follows:

IBM announced today that it has learned that it has been temporarily suspended from participating in new business with U.S. Federal government agencies.

The notice of temporary suspension was issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and relates to an investigation by the EPA of possible violations of the Procurement Integrity provisions of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy Act regarding a bid for business with the EPA originally submitted in March 2006. The temporary suspension applies to all Federal agencies and IBM business units. IBM may continue awards in existence as of the date of this suspension, unless a particular agency directs otherwise.

So, apparently the United Kingdom is considering compiling a database. Logged in this database will be the academic records of every UK citizen aged 14 or older. This isn't going over very well with anyone. To start things off, the government's track record with data isn't the cleanest (anyone remember the little incident with lost health records?). The main beef that most people have with this plan is that it gives possible employers access to the academic records of people. What's wrong with this is put into words quite elegantly, as stated by a professor from the University of London:

This disregards how people change throughout their lives. Academic records are no indication of future success. There are many reasons for the grades we get: they might reflect the teaching or a personal crisis. People who do badly at school often do well later in life. There's a danger that these records prevent change and progress for the better.

Whether the UK plans to continue compiling this database after such criticism is unclear at this point.