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> I don't think you can fathom the amount of people that have phones with roughly 3 years of no android updates as their primary device with which they use all the digital services they use, Banking, Texting, Doomscrolling, Porn, ...

I do. I'm an embedded software developer in a team that cares about having our software up-to-date a lot.

> Users, especially the most likely to be exploited are already vulnerable to so much shit and even when there's a literal finished fix available, these vendors do shit about it. Only when their bottomline is threatened because even my mom knows "Don't buy anything with ASUS on it, your bank account gets broken into if you do" will we see change.

Yes individuals are quite exploitable. That's why I really like EU's new regulations Cyber Resiliency Act and new Radio Equipment Directive. When governments enforce reasonable disclosure and fixing timelines, then threaten your company's ability to sell things in a market alltogether, if you don't comply, it works wonders. Companies hate not being able to make money. So all the extra security policies and vulnerability tracking we have been experimenting with and secure-by-default languages are now the highest priority for us.

EU regulation makes sure that you're not going to be sold a router that's instantly hackable in a year. It will also force chip manufacturers to have meaningful maintenance windows like 5-10 years due to pressure from ODMs. That's why you're seeing all the smartphone manufacturers have extended support timelines, it is not pure market pressure. They didn't give fuck about it for more than 10 years. When EU came with a big stick though...

Spreading word-of-mouth knowledge works until a point. Having your entire product line being banned entering a market works almost every time.



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