Comment by Gigachad
1 day ago
I think this is true, but on the flip side it could become common to buy "blank" hardware where the user provides their own OS or firmware. In the past it was just too burdensome to do this so we expected the hardware vendor to provide the software, but we could enter an era where providing the software is relatively easy.
I think one area we are seeing this is the flood of hand held emulator gaming machines. Companies in China pump these things out and the community has provided numerous custom firmwares to the point a new one seems to come out every week. All vibe coded in Rust but who cares, if it plays the games and looks nice that's all you need.
Even better, there's all sorts of e-waste tier devices that can get a second life now. One of my many projects right now is bringing up my own software stack on the Echo Dot 2nd gen, there's tons of hardware that can be bought for almost nothing (or already sitting in a box :P) just waiting to be liberated.
The next generation of products may be much more aggressively locked down however. Even old stuff like the xbox 360 is still quite difficult to hack.
I used to be kind of indifferent to devices that let you flash your own firmware because I knew there was no way I'd ever bother writing firmware. But now the community is generating decent quality alternative firmwares for everything, devices having an unlocked bootloader could be a requirement going forward. If I buy an ereader in the future it will have to be fully unlocked so I can load whatever the latest community built firmware is.
that's the xbox one, not the 360. 360 has been jailbroken since like forever even when it wasn't EOL. xbox one is the one which is only starting to get exploits today long after its lifespan (partly because of good security and partly because devmode exists so way less incentive to bother)
but it's simply impossible to make a device which can keep a secret in presence of an attacker with physical access. It might be very hard but it's literally impossible, even embedded hardware keys can be extracted