Seems like a common sense measure that shouldn't be conditional on whether or not OS updates stop. PCs have worked this way for decades, and some phones and tablets, as well. It's a shame that competition is limited like this.
I believe almost all modern game consoles live in this space, I would expect Amazon's Kindle devices are in this category, etc. And while I don't like this model and won't participate in such ecosystems, neither can I deny that such things are fairly common and popular. Forcing open firmware on those would likely generate a much larger, and, frankly, better funded response to being able to maintain a locked down firmware for the useful life of the system.
Picking specifically on the "no longer receiving firmware updates" category makes it much harder for those companies to argue that having to do this will hurt their profits or hinder their ability to recover losses on subsidized hardware - they literally don't care enough to bother updating them at this point, so it would be much harder for them to make these claims. You abandon a device once you're done earning your money back on it. I doubt Sony, for instance, still expects much return on deployed Playstation 3s. And it's exceedingly hard for Apple to argue that they're making any money on an iPhone 3GS or something, because it doesn't even run modern app store packages.
So my logic here is that "you must unlock abandoned devices for those who care" is likely to be winnable, whereas "All devices must be unlockable from day 1" isn't.
I would prefer something like after 5 years they have to unlock the bootloader and allow people to install anything. So you have 5 years to make a profit and then you have to open up the device.
Wouldn't that be invalidated by games no longer working? They were very eager to move to cloud gaming, always on networking style DRM but once the servers are down and the games become less and less functional or stop working altogether that excuse goes bye-bye, doesn't it?
We wouldn’t even be having a discussion like this in a functioning democracy. But instead we’re discussing whether the big corporate bribery machine will get in the way of completely reasonable legislation.
A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. You're not going to convince Congress critters to do something that can legitimately be argued to hurt businesses. So you tweak things to create a minmax situation where the businesses can not be said to be injured and we still gain access to abandoned hardware and are able to repurpose it.
The key is to go in with carefully charged words. Abandoned hardware is a good one. So is recycling electronics to extend their usefulness. How can companies argue they're being hurt by competition from abandoned hardware that is just e-waste unless it is allowed to be recycled?
By pointing out that the products they are currently selling could be replaced by the reanimated spirits of the products they sold last year. Labor performed without a transfer of money to go along with it is not counted in the GDP or taxed, in modern mercantilism it is better for $100 to circulate in a day to produce a little value than for $1 to circulate in a week to produce much more value.
They can say that, but it makes them look like assholes. So it's not effective for them to do that.
Unfortunately, there a lot of assholes that only act like assholes behind closed doors with other assholes that tolerate them being assholes because they spend money out the asshole.
/s
But actually my point is that public PR team can't say that but Tim Cook giving Ted Cruz a quiet phone call can totally say that (off the record), probably followed up with "this would keep us from affording that new Texas factory/office/thing we were about to build with this money we make"
An example of this would be marijuana legislation and the idea that marijuana is a "gateway drug." This is a somewhat sensible view that a political party can latch onto and push without losing too much popular support.
I have to wonder if "new firmware on old devices" has a public-facing view that won't crater a politician's popularity. I'm sure there has to be one, but I don't know what it would be.
The lack of any large important group that cares about this enough to try and smear a politician against it is enough. No one outside of nerds cares because no one knows to care. Compare it to abortion or guns, lots of regular people care or could be corralled into caring.
If a politician is quizzed about their stance on end of life firmware, they can just say "I want to not end the life... of babies! The other guys want to abort your children" and then the whole topic is lost and they deflected successfully.
The people who bought and got value from systems that otherwise wouldn't have been developed?
It's hard to rely on the argument that 'the market decides the price of goods' if you would like to restrict what companies are allowed to offer for purchase.
If the manufacturer is selling at a loss, with the intention of making that money back through software, and that subsidy is removed, the majority of customers will see this as a loss.
Nintendo does not sell their consoles at a loss. They make a profit on every console sold. Their hardware is never bleeding edge but they make up for it on the strength of their first party franchises and their innovative controllers/input devices.
I've tried to keep away from ecosystems like this, but the way is very much dark and full of terrors. As far as I can tell, a smartphone is a prerequisite for participation in much of society today. What phone do you use -- an unlocked Android model, I'd guess? Or something like the Fairphone that I can't get in the USA?
I imagine there would need to be a special protections in the clause for "secure embedded industrial" devices like that — something like: "if opening your company's devices to free modification would create a national security risk, then your company is not allowed to go out of business in the first place; instead, bankruptcy of your company will lead to immediate nationalization of such assets as are required to keep your devices up-to-date with secure firmware in perpetuity."
(It's actually kind of weird that there isn't already anything like this on the books in America; so it was possible for the private sector to e.g. shut down all the 5.25"-floppy-disk factories, despite military missile control systems still actively depending on them. You'd think governments would wield at least contract law — if not legislation — more eagerly, to protect "critical logisticla dependencies" like these.)
My goal is not to discourage "Fully Finished" sort of products - if you have some widget that does X, and you've optimized the firmware to do X, and it won't need to do anything else beyond X, then... OK, good job, please make more things.
The target here is "consumer electronics" sort of devices - phones, speakers, fridges, washers, etc. And I don't think it has to be a "default unlocked" process, so much as "Some process to allow you to boot what you want." And if that's "I submit a blob upstream and they sign it so it can shim my kernel," well... not great, but OK.
However, the reality for something like your scenario, nuclear control systems, is that anyone who can get close enough (physically or digitally) to one for it to matter isn't going to be hindered by some pesky firmware lock.
I mean, being unable to modify secure embedded systems by getting close to them "digitally" is the whole positive point of the much-reviled-in-personal-computing Trusted Computing Base paradigm. If Intel CPUs can cryptographically verify that microcode updates come only from Intel, and that the bootloader ROM is signed by the manufacturer key stored in the CPU's own TPM, then the microcontrollers in critical systems like these should be doing no less. "Unlocking" such a system to free modification by the installation IT administrator really does lose you some quite-powerful security advantages vs. having an end-to-end-secure logistical pipeline for updates direct from the manufacturer to your microcontroller, that not even the site admin can tamper with.
Also, on a tangent — with really-critical embedded systems, there are ways to prevent physical proximity from giving someone the keys to the kingdom as well. For example: making the system a distributed-majority-consensus system run across several secure installations, where you'd need to physically penetrate several installations at once — hopefully all with independently-designed security policies — in order to get the system as a whole to do something else. Where any timing slip-ups would reveal one of the systems as faulty, and prompt an immediate [probably armed] investigation response.
Should be, I agree. Though I would doubt that they are. We've seen plenty of malware packages related to industrial control systems over the past decade or so, which mostly rely on "compromising the workstation that programs PLCs and fixes their behavior over the network to meet the attacker's desires."
My goal here certainly isn't to impact industrial control systems, but to generate less ewaste of "Well, we're bored with it, good luck!" end of life devices.
I think that's mostly to do with the fact that many industrial control systems still in use predate TCB or anything like it. "Why change what works", etc. Contracts for new designs, meanwhile, tend to specify all the security they can think of.
>The case of the toaster is very clear: we can't tell, except by taking it apart, whether it has a processor and software or a special-purpose chip. Since that we can't tell the difference, it makes no difference: therefore, a program that will never be changed is equivalent to a circuit. I don't care whether a toaster or microwave oven contains software.
https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/14/05/05/2012218/richa...
These types of devices do receive regular firmware updates. And (certain models of them) are required to operate in high-security environments, where the end-to-end logistical security of update delivery is part of what the customers of those systems are paying for by buying them. Also, in general, these systems have "no user-modifiable parts"; all the useful configuration for them is exposed on the outside, where nothing you'd want to do with them would require hacking them — because much of the point of these devices is to be a hermetic environment isolating the data they evaluate or carry from interference by third parties.
Maybe the best example in this category would be an Intrusion Detection System. It's definitely a full computer! But if you're the sort of company that needs one of those, then you certainly don't want the IDS itself to have any exploit surface whatsoever — including at the firmware level. And you'd rather lose out on ability to install custom firmware on your own IDS, if that means that an APT loses the ability to rootkit your IDS.
I don't really understand the example. Shouldn't a power plant get access to their own systems?
If someone has physical access they could always throw a wrench into it.
The whole idea of allowing alternate firmware is that it shouldn't need the original keys.
These can include electric, gas, and water meters on homes and businesses; computing devices in correctional settings; certain military systems; gaming (gambling) systems like slot machines; etc. They aren't the usual use case but they are real and they are out there in significant numbers.
Maybe for a gambling machine you'd do it differently, but those are already very specially handled.
1. The government can just say "we'll spend $10,000 per flop-disk reader" and some one will probably find a way to produce that profitably.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
but mandatory bootloader unlock after 5, 10 years seems perfectly reasonable to empower consumers.
Could happen in the EU but will never ever happen in the USA
And it's not just phones and tablets, there are millions of smart-watches out there like from Garmin that become paperweights