Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive
by cryptoz on Friday August 18, 2023 @01:50PM
(#37179475)
Software does degrade with age, though. Simply the fact that vulnerabilities are found over time means that our understanding of a piece of software and how it works changes. But it's not just vulnerabilities being found, it's protocols used that may be unsupported etc. That change is a kind of a rot like people call 'bit rot' but it's a specific software rot that does happen. Systems are complicated.
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Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive
by z3t4 on Friday August 18, 2023 @02:42PM
(#37180214)
An example is SSL root certificates, which expire by design. Also ABI. But if you use containers or virtual machines you can basically have a program run forever.
Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive
by arter4 on Friday August 18, 2023 @03:55PM
(#37181222)
You can, but you shouldn't, because at some point you should patch the vulnerabilities you inevitably find on any non-trivial piece of code after a while.
Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive
by bombcar on Friday August 18, 2023 @04:29PM
(#37181661)
Certain code can run with bugs forever, even vulnerabilities, because it will never interact with anything (see the famous "the missile" bug - a counter would overflow at some point, but by then the warhead would have detonated, so who cares?).
Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive
by JohnFen on Friday August 18, 2023 @05:17PM
(#37182253)
Sure, but none of that applies to non-networked embedded systems.
Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive
by kwhitefoot on Friday August 18, 2023 @04:00PM
(#37181297)
Most software used not to be connected to the outside world. It wasn't vulnerable at all unless the attacker already had control of the host.
In the thirty years I spent developing software I spent hardly any time on anything that was accessible through the network and I'm confident that I'm not the only one. The embedded control software that I wrote for 6502s would still work today and would be completely invulnerable to attacks other than from someone standing right in front of the machine pushing buttons.
Of course now that everything has to be networked so that your fridge can advertise special offers to you the situation is changing for the worse.
Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive
by deterministic on Monday August 21, 2023 @05:34AM
(#37207192)
Brand new software made yesterday is full of bugs and will kill or maim you if you try to use it for safety critical systems. I trust 10+ years old code that has been proven in combat. Not crappy new code written by some arrogant young “Ninja” who has no clue on how little he/she/it knows.