[salawat]

Which is exactly how you end up with more etrash when a company goes out of business.

Also, you've just made replacement/repair/support far more complicated and dangerous for everyone than it need be. You must be 10% smarter than any piece of equipment you are operating to safely use it, and be "ahead of the machine".

I truly believe we have suffered greatly as a civilization for our willingness to lose sight of that, and to have allowed the siren call of "abstraction" to charm us into making things so absurdly complicated that short of neverending population growth to bring into existence more people to solve all the new problems people have created, one is hard pressed to even read everything necessary to understand why most things are the way they are.

[bayindirh]

When done with proper contracting and documentation, losing a company is not a problem, because either you put the spec and the algorithm on the table, and people implement it to get certified, or you get the technical docs to use when/if the company goes out of business.

Practically, it doesn’t do anything more complicated. Device provides you an ID without a password, but accepts everything else with a password. In many countries, if not all, infrastructure equipment is already protected property. Nobody except the utility company touch, repair, reconfigure that meter, anyway.

Overcomplicating stuff is indeed a problem, and it’s a combination of poor engineering plus monetary greed in most cases. Also it’s a side effect of evolution of technology. I would love to discuss it to death, but this is not the place and I don’t have much time for it either.