[svnt]

The same thing happened to my car — they discontinued support for the cellular module it shipped with. I had to bring it in (and I believe pay something) to have the module updated. I did not and now it no longer has the online functionality.

Brakes are not internet-connected, but where the line is between features or functions that might be lost and those that represent the core of the product is an interesting question.

[TeMPOraL]

That's the thing though: most IoT devices shouldn't be Internet-connected, and most definitely should not depend on a vendor cloud (or increasingly, a cloud of a different vendor that sold white-label IoT solution to the "vendor" you you bought the device from). It's an unnecessary limitation, a combination of laziness (going over cloud is easier than figuring out local-first and standardizing on some VPN solution) and abusive business (the cloud on the other side of the world is holding your Internet-connected air conditioner hostage, better play nice).

If brakes are not Internet-connected, that's mostly because they were established before Internet - and given the trends in car manufacturing in general, it's only a matter of time.

(In some sense, we're already there - if you have cloud-connected self-driving, and that self-driving can override your command to apply brakes, then your brakes are de-facto Internet-connected, even if connectivity isn't a hard dependency in all cases just yet.)

[rollcat]

Brakes are fundamentally both a safety-critical system, and one that is both relatively well isolated from other systems, and dead simple in principle (a bike has simple mechanical brakes and a 3yro could explain why they work).

The issue with software OTOH, is that a security hole in one trivial component (e.g. resize images to make thumbnails) can often lead to a full system compromise. Even if you don't get full root, you can still use a compromised system to your advantage: steal personal data, use it in a botnet, serve malware, mine proof of waste, etc.

On top of that, adding a dependency is often made very easy by modern package managers, and as the number goes up it gets rather difficult even to vet your direct dependencies, let alone transitive. Installing brakes in a vehicle doesn't automatically pull in a kitchen sink, but in the software world it's widely accepted, almost inevitable. You can spend your time removing the 90% of that library that you don't need, and rewriting the remaining 10%, or you do the "reasonable" thing and just ship.