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I was flying from Dublin to Newark on Saturday on a United flight. At some point during our flight the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. When it came

I was flying from Dublin to Newark on Saturday on a United flight. At some point during our flight the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. When it came back up, the splash screen hit me with a huge amount of nostalgia. It was RedBoot with a kernel build date from 2004. Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical, but it's telling. There is a huge cadence mismatch between software cycles and capital good replacement cycles. Airplanes, factories, HVAC systems, even home appliances last for decades. Software on these systems needs to get upgraded, I can't even imagine the number of security patches that have gone into the Linux kernel in the last 11 years.

theandrewbailey 11y ago
This is the Achilles heel of the entire Internet of Things and smart appliance trend, and I think this will bite everyone bad. After 50+% of these vendors go out of business in the next decade, their products won't get updated, and people will wonder why their "smart" TV can't watch movies from whatever replaced Netflix/new whizbang video service. They won't be as likely to buy any "smart" thing again.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  Probably the only reason why your ca. 2005 linux media pc won't work in your current living room is that its hardware can't support your new 4K flatscreen. Open software could go some way towards addressing the update problem, but it would need to have a much more robust code signing infrastructure behind it, to avoid becoming an even worse morass of security problems than the morass we have today. (Generally, not in open software.)
- jkestner 11y ago
  That will only matter if companies don't train customers to expect frequent upgrade cycles. It's worked for consumer electronics, but there will be strain in previously "came with the house" objects. You'll need to sidestep people's habits, in the way that the microwave did, perhaps. And we're only worried about vendors going out of business because it's the early days and it's largely startups pushing the trend. With a Samsung or Apple, it's more that they'll quickly (by home equipment standards) stop supporting whatever doesn't stick to the wall. There is a case to be made for self-contained objects that don't derive most of their value from an ecosystem, but work normally with no network. Work up from a toaster, not down from a computer.
  - rcthompson 11y ago
    Are you arguing that frequent upgrade cycles are a good thing?
    - jkestner 11y ago
      Definitely not, for the consumer. For the manufacturers, sure. Supporting a cheap piece of hardware for several years when consumers are going to demand it works with HomeKit, Google @Home, or whatever it's called now, and their descendants, and Microsoft's play, and the many competitors yet to come — that'll suck. Traditional hardware makers are going to have to factor the support of this software component into their prices now.
- a3n 11y ago
  Roughly OT: I have yet to have seen anything that makes me look forward to the IoT, and when I talk to the voices of vendors in my head I'm basically telling them "Stay out of my refrigerator, my furnace, my toilet and my smart doorlock that I'll never have." I just don't feel that anything relevant to the IoT is missing from my life. At all.
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    I can see "Check if I left the stove on and turn it off remotely" being a neat thing to have. But not neat enough to let a 10 year old appliance with no software updates and the capability to burn my house down be accessible to the internet.
    - exelius 11y ago
      Yeah, but chances are you won't use the functionality often enough to configure it in the first place. That's the real problem with the Internet of Things: most of the things we own are not all that useful when we're not in close proximity to them. Thus, not only are users and manufacturers unlikely to update them in the future; users are just as unlikely to connect the thing in the first place. Home automation through things like light switches, etc. has a use case, but those products have been available and Internet-connected for over a decade and we still haven't seen wide adoption. I recently priced it out -- it would cost me over $5000 to swap out the outlets and switches in my house for Insteon devices. And that's just the hardware; not the electrician required to connect it all or the time I would spend configuring everything. Home builders aren't going to spend that kind of money building this into anything but the most high-end homes -- the IoT hardware alone blows through the fixtures and appliances budget that most home builders allocate. People want systems that "just work". IoT does not "just work", and none of the current or announced implementations address the big problems around configuration (namely, every house is different so every implementation is custom). And in some cases like a stove or a refrigerator, any amount of configuration is going to be too much.
      - wlesieutre 11y ago
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  I bought an LG smart TV a while ago. It stopped receiving firmware updates after a couple years and is now way behind current models in terms of features--and, I can only imagine, security patches. I will go out of my way to buy a dumb TV next time.
  - cma 11y ago
    Mine updated itself to add a big banner advertisement to the main screen. It originally had no ads.
  - nodata 11y ago
    > I will go out of my way to buy a dumb TV next time. How? I don't see any dumb TVs for sale.
    - morsch 11y ago
      Isn't dumb TV just another word for monitor these days?
      - nodata 11y ago
        Because you no longer need a tuner? Could be. But I doubt you could buy a 60" glass front monitor for the price they sell TVs :)
      - sliverstorm 11y ago
        They certainly seem to be similar! But, a number of differences do arise from intended use. - TVs don't need anywhere near the same level of display quality. They are viewed from ten feet away and do not render small text, so they don't need as clear a picture. They also don't really have to go over 30fps, and latency is less of a concern. Basically, they have looser constraints in many ways, making them cheaper - TVs have a plethora of inputs of many formats - TVs have remote controls
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        > Isn't dumb TV just another word for monitor these days? A dumb TV still has a TV tuner, so they aren't equivalent. But unless you plan on plugging it directly into an antenna for OTA broadcasts, they are basically equivalent.
- rcraft 11y ago
  This is exactly why I prefer buying "dumb" tvs and simply adding chromecast/appletv/firetv, etc. Much better experience.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    It doesn't really matter that much if it's dumb or smart. You can use a Chromecast with either, and refusing to buy one kind limits your choices.
    - antsar 11y ago
      You can use a Chromecast with either, but one of them can also spy on you without your consent.
      - kstenerud 11y ago
        Not if it isn't connected to your network.
        antsar 11y ago
        Valid point. But then you're left with a bunch of crap in the UI that is unnecessary and annoying at best.
        kstenerud 11y ago
        Really? I'm not. My smart TV defaults to just displaying whatever the incoming signal tells it to. And if some manufacturer decides to clutter things, I just won't buy it. Problem solved.
        rcthompson 11y ago
        It's not too much of a stretch for smart TVs to start including cellular connectivity (and advertising it as "zero-setup").
        11y ago
- saosebastiao 11y ago
  I know it is just an OS kernel and security is far more comprehensive than having a secure kernel, but this is an amazing start: https://sel4.systems/ https://sel4.systems/ I'm surprised IoT conversations are still happening with Linux as a contender for the OS, let alone Windows.
- wazoox 11y ago
  Actually one month ago in Amsterdam I've used a Philips smart TV that complained about "youtube is not supported anymore yadda yadda". Programmed obsolescence at its best (this TV probably wasn't more than 3 or 4 years old).
- danudey 11y ago
  Heck, just look at the huge number of Android phones that you can buy at retail with an out-of-date version of Android with known security holes which will never be patched or updated. And those are relatively complex devices which are trivial for users to update if given the option, based on the adoption rates for e.g. iOS updates. A company doesn't have to be out of business to not do security updates; they can not do security updates starting day one. There was an article a while ago about tons of home router vendors with insecure software from a third party, where the third party had resolved security issues years ago but the vendors had never bothered to update, leaving hundreds of thousands of devices vulnerable over the last few years.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  They don't even need to go bankrupt. I have an LG television that has been promising new widgets ever since I first got it, and no new widget has ever appeared. The impetus there was that LG changed its net-connected TV platform in 2011, and instantly dropped all support for older devices. One would think that a final update could remove that "coming soon" box from their proprietary added-feature screen, but they haven't even bothered to do that. So I can watch NetFlix and YouTube on that device, but not Amazon instant video, or Crackle, or Crunchyroll, or Vimeo, or any of the dozens of selections available to better supported platforms. Having learned my lesson, and aware of the increasingly stalkerish behavior of "smart" televisions, my next TV purchase was very specifically a dumb screen. If I want an internet-connected service now, I use the Wii, or XBox, or the extended desktop from the nearest computer. I will likely refuse to buy any network-enhanced appliance in the future, unless I am able to root/jailbreak it and install software without the manufacturer's stamp of approval. I probably wouldn't do much beyond installing ChillBox, or FridgeBSD, or CryogenMod, or whatever, but it feels like the possibility might keep them a little more honest. Because you know that refrigerator hackers would be capturing and picking apart every packet that thing sends out, quickly discovering that every time someone closes the door, it sends a tattle out to fridge-use.org about how long you stood there with the fridge door open, along with before-and-after photos of your food. Though it would also be embarrassing if they marketed value models of a product line by disabling features in software/firmware, and some NetBSD-loving punks could come along and write a simple script that turns the doohickey that retails at $200 into the one that sells for $800. So it's already too late for me. "Smart" appliances are just another low-capability computer that I will have to support as the in-home IT guy. And I will have to presume that they come pre-loaded with all manner of crapware and spyware. I would forever need to be checking on chipsets and revision numbers and compatibility lists. No thanks. It's hard enough managing the congestion on the home WiFi already.
- pubnub 11y ago
  Use https://resin.io/ https://resin.io/ yo
stcredzero 11y ago
There is a huge cadence mismatch between software cycles and capital good replacement cycles. How well would you say that Tesla is coping with this as a company? For that matter, what about Apple? I can't even imagine the number of security patches that have gone into the Linux kernel in the last 11 years. Let's take a step back and think about this statement. Isn't this insane? We know enough to be able to build something much better than this. The reason that we don't, is that we've just kept on pragmatically building on what we had before. We're like a corporation that keeps pouring money into its "stovepipe" system because we keep on making short-term decisions. (Somehow "stovepipe" has come to mean "vertically isolated," but I seem to remember that it also used to refer to the tendency of iron stovepipes to corrode and need constant patching.)
- bitwize 11y ago
  How well would you say that Tesla is coping with this as a company? For that matter, what about Apple? Apple just kind of assumes that you have the latest shiny, because why wouldn't you? This induces a phenomenon I call the Apple Turnover: when a software update aimed at new Apple things comes out and makes your old Apple thing not run so good anymore. Sluggish iPhones are the hallmark example today, but I was bitten badly by this in the mid-2000s when Panther would no longer compile C++ files. You see, one of Apple's OS updates for Panther came with Tiger's libstdc++, which used the new Itanium ABI. This was so Xcode for Tiger could compile programs to run on Panther, but without heroic efforts to set up compiler flags in every package you built to link against the old static libstdc++, compiling on Panther would link against the new libstdc++ by default and fail horribly, rendering C++ code uncompilable. (Deleting or renaming the new libstdc++ was not an option; it was a heavily depended on system component and I think even the header files were changed for the new library.) And a lot of stuff depended on C++, including C-API stuff like SDL. And Apple did fuck all to fix it. So if you buy a shiny Apple toy, your choices are to commit to upgrading early in the new product cycle or risk an Apple Turnover rendering your purchase, if not useless, then with degraded functionality even relative to the same device when you bought it. And the pisser is during the 80s and 90s, Apple gear was legendary for running well, and being supported, many years if not more than a decade after its purchase date.
dba7dba 11y ago
Considering the ridiculous amount of testing required (rightly so) for any change on the jetliners, they probably cannot keep up with the patches. One Windows running company I worked for long time ago simply didn't apply the patches. They said it broke things...
- stcredzero 11y ago
  I've had demos ruined by iOS 8.x patches! (By changes to pretty well established code, like NSTimer and UIImageView updating.) I could easily believe that Windows patches would break things.
- TheCapn 11y ago
  Depends on the risk it poses and the attack vectors available. If you can assume jetliners use a custom hardware with no web tie ins and no physical access (USB/otherise) then security patches covering attacks that require those vectors are kind of moot aren't they? A whole lot of testing and verification would go into applying a patch that is rendered useless by other security precautions.
nostromo 11y ago
> Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical According to recent reports, the entertainment system is not fully isolated from the plane's navigation systems. However, Boeing has denied this. http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight-computer-systems/ http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight-computer-...
- Cacti 11y ago
  That's because the researcher didn't do that on an actual plane. In fact it wasn't even a simulator, it was a virtualized simulator where he put the systems all on the same bus. On top of that the guy was only able to listen in on traffic. The entire story is bogus. The systems are isolated just fine.
  - jfaat 11y ago
    Can you provide a source? [edit] I've seen the claim made more than once in this thread without a source. I understand that the article was probably very wrong. I'm just interested to know if a reputable publication has confirmed this or if it's just conjecture.
    - burger_moon 11y ago
      I know this doesn't mean diddly squat, but my sister worked for a manufacturer of airline wiring harnesses up until very recently, and when I asked about it, she mentioned that they were not interconnected or exposed to one another. I don't believe they did the really huge jets, but regional and private sized jet harnesses instead, so it could be different in that aspect also.
    - nradov 11y ago
      Can you provide a reputable source to prove that President Obama is not a disguised lizard alien? ☺ I mean the original article was so obviously nonsense on the face of it that no refutation should be necessary.
  - EvanAnderson 11y ago
pedrocr 11y ago
Exactly because of this I think Fred Wilson is spot on in saying expensive things will stay dumb and the smarts will be in the cheaper replaceable gadgets[1]. Cars have already done that with audio (bluetooth works reasonably well). Hopefully one of the video casting solutions will solve video as well so we can stop mounting smartphones on the dash and just cast the images into the car's screen. [1] http://avc.com/2011/12/cheap-willl-be-smart-expensive-will-be-dumb/ http://avc.com/2011/12/cheap-willl-be-smart-expensive-will-b...
petercooper 11y ago
The IFE system on a 747 I was on a couple of years ago was running Windows 98, complete with graphical boot screen :-) (Edit: Removed airline, I like them too much.)
- joezydeco 11y ago
  Okay well then you must be lying because that's just not possible (the airline thing, not the Win98)
  - mikeash 11y ago
    I think he may be trying to tell us that they're holding him hostage and we should call the police.
cletus 11y ago
This reminds me of the rumours that Apple would release a TV. Frankly I never believed it and (IMHO) you have to be pretty ignorant of Apple to think the rumours had any credence whatsoever. The upgrade cycles are simply too long for TVs. But more importantly, Apple's whole model is to treat things like this as just "dumb complements". Your mobile device is, from the carrier's perspective, is increasingly becoming an a dumb Internet pipe (first with the App Store, later with the likes of iMessages and how LTE works, etc). The TV for Apple is simply a dumb display to stick an Apple TV into. A sub-$100 device you can replace every other year if need be. A $3000 TV is replaced a whole lot less often. Why would Apple want to be in the business of (eventually) supporting 5+ year old TVs for such a low-margin business? Or what makes you think users would pay for the Apple brand and/or upgrade more often to make it worthwhile? So as far as IoT goes, I have trouble seeing a future where someone says "I need to buy new lightbulbs because mine don't get firmware updates anymore" or "I need to buy a new fridge because it can't talk to my new phone".
- ghaff 11y ago
  Smart TVs doubtless sound like a great idea if you're a TV manufacturer who desperately wants to shorten upgrade cycles and sell higher-margin "value add" in a world where so many people already have HD TVs that are pretty much as big as they have room for. For everyone else? Not so much. Not only does it make sense to put the smarts and connectivity in devices that are either cheap, that people already have anyway, and can be easily upgraded but the user interface in a phone/tablet/etc. tends to be far better than a typical remote. In general, I tend to prefer the Chromecast model of just casting video from a general purpose device, but the Kindle stick and Apple TV are OK as well. By contrast, I rarely used the Smart TV features on my Panasonics because they were just so painful to use.
keeperofdakeys 11y ago
19 January 2038 will be a very interesting day, since that's when signed 32 bit unix time will overflow. I don't want to think about how much software would rely on that, especially critical embedded hardware.
- srtjstjsj 11y ago
  An embedded system with a 30-year lifespan and no maintenance plan?

theandrewbailey 11y ago

This is the Achilles heel of the entire Internet of Things and smart appliance trend, and I think this will bite everyone bad. After 50+% of these vendors go out of business in the next decade, their products won't get updated, and people will wonder why their "smart" TV can't watch movies from whatever replaced Netflix/new whizbang video service. They won't be as likely to buy any "smart" thing again.

stcredzero 11y ago
Probably the only reason why your ca. 2005 linux media pc won't work in your current living room is that its hardware can't support your new 4K flatscreen. Open software could go some way towards addressing the update problem, but it would need to have a much more robust code signing infrastructure behind it, to avoid becoming an even worse morass of security problems than the morass we have today. (Generally, not in open software.)
jkestner 11y ago
That will only matter if companies don't train customers to expect frequent upgrade cycles. It's worked for consumer electronics, but there will be strain in previously "came with the house" objects. You'll need to sidestep people's habits, in the way that the microwave did, perhaps. And we're only worried about vendors going out of business because it's the early days and it's largely startups pushing the trend. With a Samsung or Apple, it's more that they'll quickly (by home equipment standards) stop supporting whatever doesn't stick to the wall. There is a case to be made for self-contained objects that don't derive most of their value from an ecosystem, but work normally with no network. Work up from a toaster, not down from a computer.
- rcthompson 11y ago
  Are you arguing that frequent upgrade cycles are a good thing?
  - jkestner 11y ago
    Definitely not, for the consumer. For the manufacturers, sure. Supporting a cheap piece of hardware for several years when consumers are going to demand it works with HomeKit, Google @Home, or whatever it's called now, and their descendants, and Microsoft's play, and the many competitors yet to come — that'll suck. Traditional hardware makers are going to have to factor the support of this software component into their prices now.
a3n 11y ago
Roughly OT: I have yet to have seen anything that makes me look forward to the IoT, and when I talk to the voices of vendors in my head I'm basically telling them "Stay out of my refrigerator, my furnace, my toilet and my smart doorlock that I'll never have." I just don't feel that anything relevant to the IoT is missing from my life. At all.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  I can see "Check if I left the stove on and turn it off remotely" being a neat thing to have. But not neat enough to let a 10 year old appliance with no software updates and the capability to burn my house down be accessible to the internet.
  - exelius 11y ago
    Yeah, but chances are you won't use the functionality often enough to configure it in the first place. That's the real problem with the Internet of Things: most of the things we own are not all that useful when we're not in close proximity to them. Thus, not only are users and manufacturers unlikely to update them in the future; users are just as unlikely to connect the thing in the first place. Home automation through things like light switches, etc. has a use case, but those products have been available and Internet-connected for over a decade and we still haven't seen wide adoption. I recently priced it out -- it would cost me over $5000 to swap out the outlets and switches in my house for Insteon devices. And that's just the hardware; not the electrician required to connect it all or the time I would spend configuring everything. Home builders aren't going to spend that kind of money building this into anything but the most high-end homes -- the IoT hardware alone blows through the fixtures and appliances budget that most home builders allocate. People want systems that "just work". IoT does not "just work", and none of the current or announced implementations address the big problems around configuration (namely, every house is different so every implementation is custom). And in some cases like a stove or a refrigerator, any amount of configuration is going to be too much.
    - wlesieutre 11y ago
snowwrestler 11y ago
I bought an LG smart TV a while ago. It stopped receiving firmware updates after a couple years and is now way behind current models in terms of features--and, I can only imagine, security patches. I will go out of my way to buy a dumb TV next time.
- cma 11y ago
  Mine updated itself to add a big banner advertisement to the main screen. It originally had no ads.
- nodata 11y ago
  > I will go out of my way to buy a dumb TV next time. How? I don't see any dumb TVs for sale.
  - morsch 11y ago
    Isn't dumb TV just another word for monitor these days?
    - nodata 11y ago
      Because you no longer need a tuner? Could be. But I doubt you could buy a 60" glass front monitor for the price they sell TVs :)
    - sliverstorm 11y ago
      They certainly seem to be similar! But, a number of differences do arise from intended use. - TVs don't need anywhere near the same level of display quality. They are viewed from ten feet away and do not render small text, so they don't need as clear a picture. They also don't really have to go over 30fps, and latency is less of a concern. Basically, they have looser constraints in many ways, making them cheaper - TVs have a plethora of inputs of many formats - TVs have remote controls
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > Isn't dumb TV just another word for monitor these days? A dumb TV still has a TV tuner, so they aren't equivalent. But unless you plan on plugging it directly into an antenna for OTA broadcasts, they are basically equivalent.
rcraft 11y ago
This is exactly why I prefer buying "dumb" tvs and simply adding chromecast/appletv/firetv, etc. Much better experience.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  It doesn't really matter that much if it's dumb or smart. You can use a Chromecast with either, and refusing to buy one kind limits your choices.
  - antsar 11y ago
    You can use a Chromecast with either, but one of them can also spy on you without your consent.
    - kstenerud 11y ago
      Not if it isn't connected to your network.
      - antsar 11y ago
        Valid point. But then you're left with a bunch of crap in the UI that is unnecessary and annoying at best.
        kstenerud 11y ago
        Really? I'm not. My smart TV defaults to just displaying whatever the incoming signal tells it to. And if some manufacturer decides to clutter things, I just won't buy it. Problem solved.
      - rcthompson 11y ago
        It's not too much of a stretch for smart TVs to start including cellular connectivity (and advertising it as "zero-setup").
        11y ago
saosebastiao 11y ago
I know it is just an OS kernel and security is far more comprehensive than having a secure kernel, but this is an amazing start: https://sel4.systems/ https://sel4.systems/ I'm surprised IoT conversations are still happening with Linux as a contender for the OS, let alone Windows.
wazoox 11y ago
Actually one month ago in Amsterdam I've used a Philips smart TV that complained about "youtube is not supported anymore yadda yadda". Programmed obsolescence at its best (this TV probably wasn't more than 3 or 4 years old).
danudey 11y ago
Heck, just look at the huge number of Android phones that you can buy at retail with an out-of-date version of Android with known security holes which will never be patched or updated. And those are relatively complex devices which are trivial for users to update if given the option, based on the adoption rates for e.g. iOS updates. A company doesn't have to be out of business to not do security updates; they can not do security updates starting day one. There was an article a while ago about tons of home router vendors with insecure software from a third party, where the third party had resolved security issues years ago but the vendors had never bothered to update, leaving hundreds of thousands of devices vulnerable over the last few years.
logfromblammo 11y ago
They don't even need to go bankrupt. I have an LG television that has been promising new widgets ever since I first got it, and no new widget has ever appeared. The impetus there was that LG changed its net-connected TV platform in 2011, and instantly dropped all support for older devices. One would think that a final update could remove that "coming soon" box from their proprietary added-feature screen, but they haven't even bothered to do that. So I can watch NetFlix and YouTube on that device, but not Amazon instant video, or Crackle, or Crunchyroll, or Vimeo, or any of the dozens of selections available to better supported platforms. Having learned my lesson, and aware of the increasingly stalkerish behavior of "smart" televisions, my next TV purchase was very specifically a dumb screen. If I want an internet-connected service now, I use the Wii, or XBox, or the extended desktop from the nearest computer. I will likely refuse to buy any network-enhanced appliance in the future, unless I am able to root/jailbreak it and install software without the manufacturer's stamp of approval. I probably wouldn't do much beyond installing ChillBox, or FridgeBSD, or CryogenMod, or whatever, but it feels like the possibility might keep them a little more honest. Because you know that refrigerator hackers would be capturing and picking apart every packet that thing sends out, quickly discovering that every time someone closes the door, it sends a tattle out to fridge-use.org about how long you stood there with the fridge door open, along with before-and-after photos of your food. Though it would also be embarrassing if they marketed value models of a product line by disabling features in software/firmware, and some NetBSD-loving punks could come along and write a simple script that turns the doohickey that retails at $200 into the one that sells for $800. So it's already too late for me. "Smart" appliances are just another low-capability computer that I will have to support as the in-home IT guy. And I will have to presume that they come pre-loaded with all manner of crapware and spyware. I would forever need to be checking on chipsets and revision numbers and compatibility lists. No thanks. It's hard enough managing the congestion on the home WiFi already.
pubnub 11y ago
Use https://resin.io/ https://resin.io/ yo

stcredzero 11y ago

There is a huge cadence mismatch between software cycles and capital good replacement cycles. How well would you say that Tesla is coping with this as a company? For that matter, what about Apple? I can't even imagine the number of security patches that have gone into the Linux kernel in the last 11 years. Let's take a step back and think about this statement. Isn't this insane? We know enough to be able to build something much better than this. The reason that we don't, is that we've just kept on pragmatically building on what we had before. We're like a corporation that keeps pouring money into its "stovepipe" system because we keep on making short-term decisions. (Somehow "stovepipe" has come to mean "vertically isolated," but I seem to remember that it also used to refer to the tendency of iron stovepipes to corrode and need constant patching.)

bitwize 11y ago
How well would you say that Tesla is coping with this as a company? For that matter, what about Apple? Apple just kind of assumes that you have the latest shiny, because why wouldn't you? This induces a phenomenon I call the Apple Turnover: when a software update aimed at new Apple things comes out and makes your old Apple thing not run so good anymore. Sluggish iPhones are the hallmark example today, but I was bitten badly by this in the mid-2000s when Panther would no longer compile C++ files. You see, one of Apple's OS updates for Panther came with Tiger's libstdc++, which used the new Itanium ABI. This was so Xcode for Tiger could compile programs to run on Panther, but without heroic efforts to set up compiler flags in every package you built to link against the old static libstdc++, compiling on Panther would link against the new libstdc++ by default and fail horribly, rendering C++ code uncompilable. (Deleting or renaming the new libstdc++ was not an option; it was a heavily depended on system component and I think even the header files were changed for the new library.) And a lot of stuff depended on C++, including C-API stuff like SDL. And Apple did fuck all to fix it. So if you buy a shiny Apple toy, your choices are to commit to upgrading early in the new product cycle or risk an Apple Turnover rendering your purchase, if not useless, then with degraded functionality even relative to the same device when you bought it. And the pisser is during the 80s and 90s, Apple gear was legendary for running well, and being supported, many years if not more than a decade after its purchase date.

dba7dba 11y ago

Considering the ridiculous amount of testing required (rightly so) for any change on the jetliners, they probably cannot keep up with the patches. One Windows running company I worked for long time ago simply didn't apply the patches. They said it broke things...

stcredzero 11y ago
I've had demos ruined by iOS 8.x patches! (By changes to pretty well established code, like NSTimer and UIImageView updating.) I could easily believe that Windows patches would break things.
TheCapn 11y ago
Depends on the risk it poses and the attack vectors available. If you can assume jetliners use a custom hardware with no web tie ins and no physical access (USB/otherise) then security patches covering attacks that require those vectors are kind of moot aren't they? A whole lot of testing and verification would go into applying a patch that is rendered useless by other security precautions.

nostromo 11y ago

> Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical According to recent reports, the entertainment system is not fully isolated from the plane's navigation systems. However, Boeing has denied this. http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight-computer-systems/ http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight-computer-...

Cacti 11y ago
That's because the researcher didn't do that on an actual plane. In fact it wasn't even a simulator, it was a virtualized simulator where he put the systems all on the same bus. On top of that the guy was only able to listen in on traffic. The entire story is bogus. The systems are isolated just fine.
- jfaat 11y ago
  Can you provide a source? [edit] I've seen the claim made more than once in this thread without a source. I understand that the article was probably very wrong. I'm just interested to know if a reputable publication has confirmed this or if it's just conjecture.
  - burger_moon 11y ago
    I know this doesn't mean diddly squat, but my sister worked for a manufacturer of airline wiring harnesses up until very recently, and when I asked about it, she mentioned that they were not interconnected or exposed to one another. I don't believe they did the really huge jets, but regional and private sized jet harnesses instead, so it could be different in that aspect also.
  - nradov 11y ago
    Can you provide a reputable source to prove that President Obama is not a disguised lizard alien? ☺ I mean the original article was so obviously nonsense on the face of it that no refutation should be necessary.
- EvanAnderson 11y ago

pedrocr 11y ago

Exactly because of this I think Fred Wilson is spot on in saying expensive things will stay dumb and the smarts will be in the cheaper replaceable gadgets[1]. Cars have already done that with audio (bluetooth works reasonably well). Hopefully one of the video casting solutions will solve video as well so we can stop mounting smartphones on the dash and just cast the images into the car's screen. [1] http://avc.com/2011/12/cheap-willl-be-smart-expensive-will-be-dumb/ http://avc.com/2011/12/cheap-willl-be-smart-expensive-will-b...

petercooper 11y ago

The IFE system on a 747 I was on a couple of years ago was running Windows 98, complete with graphical boot screen :-) (Edit: Removed airline, I like them too much.)

joezydeco 11y ago
Okay well then you must be lying because that's just not possible (the airline thing, not the Win98)
- mikeash 11y ago
  I think he may be trying to tell us that they're holding him hostage and we should call the police.

cletus 11y ago

This reminds me of the rumours that Apple would release a TV. Frankly I never believed it and (IMHO) you have to be pretty ignorant of Apple to think the rumours had any credence whatsoever. The upgrade cycles are simply too long for TVs. But more importantly, Apple's whole model is to treat things like this as just "dumb complements". Your mobile device is, from the carrier's perspective, is increasingly becoming an a dumb Internet pipe (first with the App Store, later with the likes of iMessages and how LTE works, etc). The TV for Apple is simply a dumb display to stick an Apple TV into. A sub-$100 device you can replace every other year if need be. A $3000 TV is replaced a whole lot less often. Why would Apple want to be in the business of (eventually) supporting 5+ year old TVs for such a low-margin business? Or what makes you think users would pay for the Apple brand and/or upgrade more often to make it worthwhile? So as far as IoT goes, I have trouble seeing a future where someone says "I need to buy new lightbulbs because mine don't get firmware updates anymore" or "I need to buy a new fridge because it can't talk to my new phone".

ghaff 11y ago
Smart TVs doubtless sound like a great idea if you're a TV manufacturer who desperately wants to shorten upgrade cycles and sell higher-margin "value add" in a world where so many people already have HD TVs that are pretty much as big as they have room for. For everyone else? Not so much. Not only does it make sense to put the smarts and connectivity in devices that are either cheap, that people already have anyway, and can be easily upgraded but the user interface in a phone/tablet/etc. tends to be far better than a typical remote. In general, I tend to prefer the Chromecast model of just casting video from a general purpose device, but the Kindle stick and Apple TV are OK as well. By contrast, I rarely used the Smart TV features on my Panasonics because they were just so painful to use.

keeperofdakeys 11y ago

19 January 2038 will be a very interesting day, since that's when signed 32 bit unix time will overflow. I don't want to think about how much software would rely on that, especially critical embedded hardware.

srtjstjsj 11y ago
An embedded system with a 30-year lifespan and no maintenance plan?