>>3839
/tech/ (albiet still a pleb) landlubber here-
>NOTE- this be a simplified and butchered explanation, designed to only highlight the parts that OP might care about. feel free to fill in anything I fucked up/glossed over.
UEFI be a BIOS replacement, designed to be easier to code, more modular, with CPU-independent drivers. It also has a bunch of other other technical benefits, but that's beyond the scope of discussion. Its also nothing new- UEFI has been standard in Macs since 2006, and most boards since 2008ish also have UEFI.
Now, there are two things about UEFI that a scurvy dog like ye needs to be concerned about. The first be secure versus legacy boot. Secure boot be a windows only security "feature" that prevents unsigned operating systems to boot on the computer. This has some benefits (say, if yer a library and ye don’t want someone to fuck around with a flashdrive-based OS) but it means that ye won't be able to boot a computer with another, unsigned operating system (like an experimental linux distro or a pirated version of windows)
As of windows 8, Microsoft required that all manufacturers of windows computers make secure boot optional and add an extra feature called "legacy boot", that allows anything to be booted on the machine if its enabled in the UEFI's settings. However, Microsoft quietly dropped that requirement for windows 10 machines, and manufacturers are now allowed to ship secureboot-only machines.
as for the phoning home part, there are two facets to that. The first be that UEFI supports networking, meaning that if someone was able to access it they could forcibly update/change yer settings. The other concern be independent from the UEFI, and be actually hiding in the firmware itself. An example of this would be the intel AMT- (active management technology) which be hardware level technology so that intel can update the firmware (and possibly other things) on yer computer remotely. AMT be completely separate from yer operating system or yer hard drive- its stored on a CMOS chip soldered directly onto the motherboard. This be also nothing new- the intel AMT actually pre-dates UEFI itself.
there are people working on disabling hardware-level backdoors, but they're a small, incredibly autistic and have only gotten it to work on a total of 5 laptops, all of which date to the bush presidency. if yer want to read more, its called the Libreboot project, but reading their documentation be like reading cult literature crossed with a quantum-mechanics textbook.
so Tl:DR-
> legacy boot be no longer required to be shipped with secure boot on windows 10 machines.
> Machines without legacy boot will be unable to load any operating system without a signed kernel, so ye can't install another OS
>There are hardware-level networked assets in most computers, and have been since at least 2006, that could potentially be used to snoop on users.
>workarounds for the hardware level stuff be in the works, but its painstaking, nuclear-physics teir hard, and only embarked on by the most devoted of autists.
so, really the best ye can do at this point be get a nice, ancient computer with the network card ripped out for all of those pictures of yer Crested Parrot, and a VPN for any high-seas action.