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Read OP's point again: You don't need security upgrades in many cases. Neither my dishwasher nor my fridge are, or should be, connected. I could imagine them ha

Read OP's point again: You don't need security upgrades in many cases. Neither my dishwasher nor my fridge are, or should be, connected. I could imagine them having some kind of protocol for remote maintenance (showing power consumption, warning about damage), but that's it. Software for utility devices should not be a selling point. It should just be there and do its job and maybe get an update every five years or so. Why does my TV need updates nowadays? My car? Do I have to download updates for my clothes or my bed soon? How about the toilet? These updates are indeed just a way to turn products you once used to buy into leased stuff. Every business loves to lease: There's much more profit in it and the customer has no say about how long they use a particular device. But as a customer I hate it. Here's just one instance: I had an old kindle paperwhite. I loved that thing for piling all the stupid, cheap scifi on it that I would otherwise have bought as cheap paperback and that would then clutter my apartment. Literally two weeks after the device went out of the warranty, amazon decided to push an over-the-air upgrade. And it bricked the device. Now customer care was nice enough to send me a new one, but what if they didn't? Who is legally to blame? I would have to explain the concept of over-the-air upgrades and how software can sometimes destroy hardware to a judge and that judge would have to apply law from a hundred years ago to that situation. In a court case over maybe $100 - good luck with that.

bigiain 5y ago
> Why does my TV need updates nowadays? My car? Do I have to download updates for my clothes or my bed soon? How about the toilet? Those things don't all need software to exist. But good luck buying a new TV or car these days that isn't 100% reliant on software to keep doing what you bought it to do. (And I'm sure there are clothes/furniture/toilet manufacturers looking very closely at John Deere's current business model to try and see if they can turn "buyers" into "recurring licensees" of their products.) But I think that's missing the article's point. It talks about "some old gadgets" and "each booted up successfully" and "Two perfectly good pieces of electronic gear have become useless, simply for want of software updates." - it's clearly not talking about clothes or beds, probably not cars (although arguably they count), and probably is talking about modern TVs (many of which het thrown away when the ancient Android version they run can no longer update to new versions of that apps the TV came with). I'm not sure whether "We should mandate that device manufacturers set aside a portion of the purchase price of a gadget to support ongoing software maintenance, forcing them to budget for a future they'd rather ignore." is the only/right answer. but the article certainly eraises an important question.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  > "Two perfectly good pieces of electronic gear have become useless, simply for want of software updates" isn't even true. The PSP is "useless" (in his book) for want of hardware updates and the same is probably true of the tablet to be honest. (Personally, my PSP isn't useless; I even have a secondary wifi running 802.11b and WEP for it and other old hardware.)
dotancohen 5y ago
> How about the toilet? So long as you flush the cache manually after each use, no, the toilet does not need software. Cache invalidation is classically a very difficult problem in software.
wolrah 5y ago
> Why does my TV need updates nowadays? My car? Because they're connected to the internet or to internet-connected networks. Anything that's connected to the internet needs to be receiving at least security updates. If it's not connected to the internet, it's your call whether the update is worthwhile If you don't want to update it, don't connect it to the internet. Easy. If you want to connect it to the internet, you need to accept the rules of society and one of those is don't leave vulnerable systems online where they can become part of a botnet and mess things up for the rest of us. I could not care less about your data, but we've seen with hacked security cameras and such that insecure crap left on the internet causes problems for everyone, not just their owners.

bigiain 5y ago

> Why does my TV need updates nowadays? My car? Do I have to download updates for my clothes or my bed soon? How about the toilet? Those things don't all need software to exist. But good luck buying a new TV or car these days that isn't 100% reliant on software to keep doing what you bought it to do. (And I'm sure there are clothes/furniture/toilet manufacturers looking very closely at John Deere's current business model to try and see if they can turn "buyers" into "recurring licensees" of their products.) But I think that's missing the article's point. It talks about "some old gadgets" and "each booted up successfully" and "Two perfectly good pieces of electronic gear have become useless, simply for want of software updates." - it's clearly not talking about clothes or beds, probably not cars (although arguably they count), and probably is talking about modern TVs (many of which het thrown away when the ancient Android version they run can no longer update to new versions of that apps the TV came with). I'm not sure whether "We should mandate that device manufacturers set aside a portion of the purchase price of a gadget to support ongoing software maintenance, forcing them to budget for a future they'd rather ignore." is the only/right answer. but the article certainly eraises an important question.

jfrunyon 5y ago
> "Two perfectly good pieces of electronic gear have become useless, simply for want of software updates" isn't even true. The PSP is "useless" (in his book) for want of hardware updates and the same is probably true of the tablet to be honest. (Personally, my PSP isn't useless; I even have a secondary wifi running 802.11b and WEP for it and other old hardware.)

dotancohen 5y ago

> How about the toilet? So long as you flush the cache manually after each use, no, the toilet does not need software. Cache invalidation is classically a very difficult problem in software.

wolrah 5y ago

> Why does my TV need updates nowadays? My car? Because they're connected to the internet or to internet-connected networks. Anything that's connected to the internet needs to be receiving at least security updates. If it's not connected to the internet, it's your call whether the update is worthwhile If you don't want to update it, don't connect it to the internet. Easy. If you want to connect it to the internet, you need to accept the rules of society and one of those is don't leave vulnerable systems online where they can become part of a botnet and mess things up for the rest of us. I could not care less about your data, but we've seen with hacked security cameras and such that insecure crap left on the internet causes problems for everyone, not just their owners.