[kristopolous]

Not necessarily. Simple things that don't have much context to interact with and are well defined can become stable.

Many chips have been stable for decades without any serious modification with today's version being effectively identical to those of 25 years ago.

It's not defacto secure, but age is not a reliable indicator without more information

[jfrunyon]

LOL.

No, virtually nothing made 18 years ago is secure. In fact virtually nothing made a day ago is secure, but when something has been sitting around stagnating for 18 years that means the world has had ~6575x as many opportunities to find a vulnerability.

[kristopolous]

What on Earth are you talking about? There's countless things.

Any random chip, let's take a max232, from 1987. It hasn't changed since 1987. They are widely used.

There's countless simple chips there that have no "security issues" such as fram and pram chips that just store data and that's it.

Many programmers are only accustomed to seeing the modern JavaScript systems with 5GB of dependencies to print hello world and sure, fine; a virtual machine on a browser, on a userland, on a kernel, there's lots of stuff there to go wrong.

That's not what this necessarily is.

Systems can be simple. You use 1970s era zilog-80 with code that hasn't changed in 30 years every day when you do things like wait at a stoplight, use municipal water when you turn on your faucet, put food in your microwave, turn on your light switch ... You probably interact with and certainly depend on more 1970s and 80s era hardware and software that's been faithfully reordered and reproduced for decades then you do any modern system.

Motorola 6800 (not a typo) MOS 6502, and Intel 8080 clones are in every car, jet airplane, bus and train made in the past 30 years or so and they are still being used; oftentimes with no real modifications, for decades.

They are used exactly because there's no surprises and everything is known and accounted for. Newness, the thing you advocate for is the vulnerability.

Society entrusts things like interbank transfers (trillions a day) and international carrier switching on these systems.

This strategy works so well that these systems are utterly invisible.