You'd be surprised how many banks, electrical grids, oil rigs, and large ships run on old hardware. If ain't broken, you don't replace it. But keeping the system up-to-date is always a benefit.

> You'd be surprised how many banks, electrical grids, oil rigs, and large ships run on old hardware. If ain't broken, you don't replace it.

That attitude has got to die in an age of everything being exploited by bad actors. Anything that has any form of networking should have regular replacement at least of the control plane components budgeted in from the start.

Most of those really old devices are usually air-gaped from the internet for incidental reasons. Either they run on closed networks or have no networking at all.

You're not going to find a 30 years old machine that controls the pumps of nuclear reactor on the internet.

But if these machines are so isolated, and given they've been running with the "if it ain't broken" mindset: why, and more importantly how do they even get updated? If they aren't being updated, why discuss constraints on updating them?

I bet they don't get updated, ever.

> You're not going to find a 30 years old machine that controls the pumps of nuclear reactor on the internet.

Stuxnet would like to have a word with you. Airgap isn't enough to prevent malware from spreading.

On the otherhand, I think you could argue that it is something to strive for in more systems.

The longer our devices can last the less ewaste we generate. It may not be the easiest to secure, but it isn't impossible.

I don't buy into that here. If it's that mission critical and hard to replace, I wouldn't touch something as essential as coreutils without a gun to my head. In the very best case, the new version would work exactly like the old one so that the 40-year-old shell scripts holding the thing together would continue working as before.