There are variations of the Skull and Crossbones here that have specific meaning?

JFC

You mean Bing AI

It's a meme about how draining the cmos battery bricked some PC's, I think. It's formatted like the Wikipedia sidebar summary for articles on wartime battles.

Here for the replies

You're in linuxmemes did you not expect a meme? xD

Also: Yes it's a meme based on a true story (see the other comments for more details)

The meme itself is based on https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/historical-battle-shitposts-decisive-victory

Well yes, assuming that:

1. you trust the hardware manufacturer
2. you can install your own keys (i.e. not locked by vendor)
3. you secure your bios with a secure password
4. you disable usb / network boot

With this you can make your laptop very tamper resistant. It will be basically impossible to tamper with the bootloader while the laptop is off. (e.g install keylogger to get disk-encryption password).

What they can do, is wipe the bios, which will remove your custom keys and will not boot your computer with secure boot enabled.

Something like a supply-side attack is still possible however. (e.g. tricking you into installing a malicious bootloader while the PC is booted)

Always use security in multiple layers, and to think about what you are securing yourself from.

For you? No. For most people? Nope, not even close.

However, it mitigates certain threat vectors both on Windows and Linux, especially when paired with a TPM and disk encryption. Basically, you can no longer (terms and conditions apply) physically unscrew the storage and inject malware and then pop it back in. Nor can you just read data off the drive.

The threat vector is basically ”our employees keep leaving their laptops unattended in public”.

(Does LUKS with a password mitigate most of this? Yes. But normal people can’t be trusted with passwords and need the TPM to do it for them. And that basically requires SecureBoot to do properly.)

Yes, as long as you get the option to disable it. And use custom keys.

It's uh, more secure.

You can set it to run only specifically signed binaries on boot.

It's so secure that the first thing under Wikipedia's entry for Secure boot is Secure boot criticism

Yes this is a real, I'm not joking.

When I was 12, I thought I had broken the family computer trying to get Ultima III to run. I read every MS-DOS manual I could find trying to fix it before someone found me out. It was the frikin CMOS battery. I learned a lot of DOS that summer.

Have you tried putting in a new battery?

I had something kiind of similar once, where it would only boot after trying to boot once, letting it run a bit in idle, and then rebooting where it would actually succeed. Turned out I forgot to put the clear cmos jumper back to neutral after i reset cmos.

So my best guess (other than new battery) is check the jumpers maybe

Y'know the setting in the bios where you can choose boot on power restore, stay off or last state? This relies on a capacitor on the motherboard near the bios battery to store the last state. This 5 cent capacitor can die and sometimes behave like you are saying. I had a repair guy fix it cheap and that server worked normally after that.

There are no civilians when profit is involved.

Yes, multiple of our Windows laptops today couldn't boot and displayed a BitLocker error message and all affected laptops somehow had an empty BIOS battery...