This article is full of inaccurate or misleading information.

It can be tempting to see this as a big conspiracy. These big corporations—Intel and hardware manufacturers—are preventing us from running the software we want to run on our own computers, as if we were using some underpowered, locked-down Surface RT instead of a powerful PC we’re supposed to have control of.

And sure, that’s true, but Boot Guard does help secure the UEFI firmware and protect against malware that infects the boot process. Intel and PC OEMs aren’t out to crush free software and prevent open hardware. The truth is more mundane—Intel and hardware manufacturers prioritize tighter security for the masses over the proprietary firmware concerns of a few.

Intel isn’t out to crush free software — rather, they don’t care about it all as long as they are getting paid. PC OEMs are however out to crush free software as it makes them less money, and the same for Microsft et. al.

BIOS and firmware-infecting worms and viruses are very, very rare in the wild and always have been, even before this sort of “security.” They are very difficult to write and not nearly as effective as attacks that compromise already relatively-insecure applications and operating systems.

Nope, the only reason to have Boot Guard and similar technologies is to prevent people from running what they want to run on their own machines. That’s all. Has absolutely nothing to do with security in any way — that’s just the pretext, the excuse.

Technical people are really bad at hiring because they expect that what they know is “general knowledge” and what anyone else knows is some special case.

When in reality, the technical world is so broad that nearly everything is a special case.

I’ve been to a good number of interviews lately and most interviewers are like this. It’s usually some irrelevant trivia questions covering what the interviewer has worked on most recently, thus what they consider “general knowledge,” with nothing of substance on which any decision should be made.

When I conduct an interview, I generally shock candidates by asking no technical questions at all. They are irrelevant. If I can’t tell that you’re technical in a regular conversation about the field and the work, then asking trivia questions won’t help.

Interviews are a terrible way for deciding who to hire anyway, but most people make them less useful than they could be.

I don’t really have a good solution that most businesses would accept since random hiring after some minimal qualification evaluation seems too risky, but I’d like to try that in the real world sometime.