The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Technical Information Signal Boost (2026-04-27)

This is an image of an 1867 patent, u.s. patent 64 205. According to the label pasted onto the original document, what was supposed to make this design better was being able to slip the foot in from the back. Scan via wikimedia commons.

All too often, while it is easy to find articles and comments decrying all the lies and bullshit posted everywhere online, including active poisoning of search engine results to make finding correct information harder, those articles and comments provide no alternatives. For example, they do not suggest alternative search engines, or admit frankly that depending on topic, it is may be necessary to use one search engine and not another. Nor do such articles or comments typically provide links to solid online sources such as curated databases, or original documents or articles. Any jerk who proposes using so-called "artificial intelligence" is a shill or a fool and should be ignored. None of that is useful. Hence I try to include direct links to useful articles, especially when they derive from solid websites and online databases because they deserve direct traffic, and what makes the "world wide web" just that is links between webpages, sites, and databases, not advertising and propaganda mills masquerading as search engines.

Among the technical topics it can be tricky to get good information on is the "UEFI," "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface." Yes, there is a prominent forum website out there (uefi.org/) with links to support documents, which can help to a degree, but the challenge is to get an accurate overview. These days wikipedia is simply too politicized to depend on in general, let alone in the case of new interfaces introduced at the behest of large corporations. Developers have their own more detailed needs, but what about for those of us who are not getting quite so deep into the details, while needing to check compatibility details and verify for ourselves whether a reported vulnerability is a genuine issue for a machine we are using or otherwise responsible for? To that end, developer Sami Tikkanen wrote an excellent, highly readable UEFI & BIOS fact sheet. Roy Schestowitz at TechRights signal-boosted the fact sheet and published a follow up article by Tikkanen as well, The UEFI Hype and Microsoft's Lies. My intention here is to give the signal boost an additional bump, as well as provide links to a pdf of each in order to add to their accessibility. (UEFI & BIOS fact sheet, Tikkanen UEFI article) While the internet archive and other projects based other than in the united states are doing important work to keep materials up and findable online, we can't just leave it to them. To the extent possible, each person who develops and/or works on a website must contribute as well. Redundancy and crosslinking are more important than ever as the pressure of attempts to swamp the web with nonsense continue.

On the matter of microsoft and UEFI in particular, it is a bit surreal to follow up on the things microsoft representatives and documents say. There seems to be a microsoft view that the only computers in all the world are those running microsoft software, similar to the view of certain united states representatives that the united states is the only country in the world buying anything or doing anything meaningful. While of course both are influential and show up in plenty of places, this is still a very strange, dissociated belief and/or act they are putting on.

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