[thelucky41]

Consumer electronics are becoming more durable. Where once I might have replaced a cell phone every year and my home router every two, I now have had the same phone for four years and my router for six. Second hand sellers and repair shops need the factory reset feature, but we all benefited when our firmware allowed the devices to become safely transferable and repairable.

From the cited paper, most of the acquired devices were not even reset:

> Not reset devices: A surprising number of devices (61% ) were not reset by the previous owners. Due to the setup of our experiment, we had no possibility of asking the previous owners any questions.

I'm doubtful this exists, but I'd like it if it were possible to perform a factory reset or account transfer completely online, and other features around improving the security in the resale market.

For those curious like me how the wifi password was actually leaked:

> WPA-supplicant is responsible for connecting to configured access points after provisioning. We found that it creates its con- figuration files on the user data partition in the folder “misc/wifi/”. Here the file “wpa_supplicant.conf ” contains the Wi-Fi credentials, such as the SSID and PSK.

[PhasmaFelis]

> Consumer electronics are becoming more durable. Where once I might have replaced a cell phone every year and my home router every two

That's kind of extreme.

I'm not sure that means they're becoming more durable, or you're getting less obsessed with owning latest-and-greatest.