this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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We do take cars that fail safety inspections off the road. You are correct, we don't hold them to higher standards, but that's not a reason why we also shouldn't remove genuine hazards off the roads.
If a car is far more likely to kill someone, it shouldn't be on public roads either. Just like devices that can't be update don't belong on public nets. The risk to the broader public is to big IMO.
Those are things that get inspected regularly because of public safety issues, not ownership issues, and in the US at least, that only happens in a subset of states anyway. That is about using something you know will likely hurt someone vs using something you know will hurt you and possibly your customers. There's a big difference in liability there.
Vacuums for example do not get regular inspections, and owners are allowed to use any product they want, even defective ones, in their own home or business, even if they pose, say, an electrical shock risk or something else that wasn't something that would have made it fail its initial certification. We don't force vacuum manufacturers to fix old product design issues.
And even if we did, how long back would we make them fix? Would 100 year old vacuums need to be brought up to modern safety standards like grounded plugs and all of the wiring to be redone to ground all the parts or more modern motors that use less power so they don't need to be grounded? What if only one person in the whole world still uses that product?
It's just not a reasonable thing to expect re-engineering old devices when a new potential owner safety issue is found.
The risk of taking down large portions of the internet has the same risks as a vacuum? Interesting.
Your right not every device has parts availability. But again, why not? Because it it'll cost more?
Your willing to risk tanking the digital economy for what has historically been huge sums of money, because we don't hold vacuum cleaners to higher standards?
I'm being obtuse, but you keep pointing to "well we don't fix that problem over there, so we shouldn't do it over here". It doesn't sway me. We should absolutely fix repability of ALL ELECRONTICS AND CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
But even the car thing is not the responsibility of the manufacturer to fix. It's the owner's responsibility and only of they actually are using it.
If companies have to update all products to keep up with modern safety standards, it would mean no new products would ever be made and the products would be exceptionally expensive since you'd only buy them once. That's not the type of economic system we live in.
And no, a router that is defective is not going to tank the digital economy just because the manufacturer doesn't fix it. Definitely not a d-link product. That's why enterprise grade commercial products are so much more expensive. They are designed for longer life. If that's what you want, then buy a commercial product and pay the company a subscription fee for support or warrantee in cases like this.
Except devices, specifically quoting routers, Do make up bot nets
That's the specfici malware used on unsecured IoT devices and routers.
I was able to find tons of scholarly articles Like this one
That specifically talk about how many of these devices get comprised.
This isn't some theoretical attack vector. This is active now.