[gruez]

> Fine. Let's try another law.

>Any locked device must brick itself after 6 months of no patches, to ensure the safety of the network.

What does this accomplish? Get people mad? Moreover, what prevents someone from making trivial patches to keep a device "up to date", kind of like how people make trivial changes to their passwords to keep up with password rotation policies?

[chasil]

Yes, aside from finally protecting our networks from hostile traffic, that is the intended purpose.

I was thinking that we could name this law after you.

[kevincox]

To be fair if the devices bricked themselves people would start to value update lufetime even more and sales of devices with short support would drop like a rock.

[gruez]

But this suffers from goodhart's law. "support period" becomes the metric to game, so manufacturers would say they "support" for 10 years or whatever, but what that entails is having an inter bump up the version number every 6 months.

[kevincox]

If they say security updates for 10 years and there are unpatched security vulnerabilities living in the device before that I think they should have to refund the purchase.