UEFI and Secure Boot with Mark Minasi

About Show #503

The BIOS has evolved, and we need to take advantage of it! While at Ignite in Atlanta, Richard sat down with Mark Minasi to talk about UEFI and SecureBoot. The conversation starts out with a bit of a history lesson about BIOS, ROM and booting up a computer. Mark tells the story of how EFI started with Intel's Itanium, and eventually appeared everywhere. UEFI is effectively an operating system in its own right, with drivers and it's own set of security risks. This leads to a conversation around SecureBoot, dealing with the challenges of resisting security exploits from startup onward. It's easy enough to get SecureBoot running, it's what happens when it's triggered that gets complicated.

When Mark Minasi attended his first lecture about computers in 1973, he learned two things. First, computers are neat. Second, many technical people are very nice folks... but they can put you to sleep in an instant while explaining technical things. Mark transformed those two insights into a career making computers easier and more fun to understand. He's done that by writing over a thousand popular computer columns, several dozen best-selling technical books, and explaining operating systems and networking to crowds from two to two thousand. Awarded "Favorite Technical Author" by CertCities four times out of four, Mark is probably best known for his "Mastering Windows Server" and "Complete PC Upgrade and Maintenance" books, both of which have seen more than 12 editions and sold over a million copies. An audience member at a recent talk remarked that he believed that Mark could "do a talk on watching paint dry that would be so good that people would be motivated to go home and paint a wall just to experience the joy of watching paint dry." While this has led to many very tempting offers from Sherwin-Williams, he's decided to stay with his first and best love... technology.

About Show #503

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