[selfhoster11]

Do you know why people sneer at such forced hardware upgrades? Because, as others have pointed out, mitigating security vulnerabilities is seen as merely the narrative.

Forcing hardware obsoletion in favour of those "hardened" platforms has two benefits, as far as certain groups of interest are concerned:

- turning existing machines into ewaste, so people buy new machines, so the money making wheels keep turning for hardware manufacturers

- normalising stronger "trusted computing" (in the Plutonium/DRM sense) capabilities, which is of course a concern for a number of groups interested in controlling what will be running on your machine.

Make no mistake, it appears that Doctorow's article on the war on general purpose computers is becoming more and more compelling as the time goes on. Some of us see forced obsolescence of older machines with weaker "security" norms as a part of that fight - on the side of the enemy.

IMO, undoing/re-thinking the last 30 years of CPU progress might just be the thing we need. We need to re-examine our foundations and fix them.