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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Intel is removing drivers and BIOS for its old desktop boards so anyone running an old Pentium-based PC has four days to get hold of anything they might need.
The warning on Intel's download center page says:
End Of Life - This download, BIOS Update [RL86510A.86A] P21, will no longer be available after November 22, 2019 and will not be supported with any additional functional, security, or other updates. All versions are provided as is. Intel recommends that users of BIOS Update [RL86510A.86A] P21 uninstall and/or discontinue use as soon as possible.
Opinion on message boards is mixed, with some accepting that a 20-year support cycle is not terrible. But others pointed out that some industries like manufacturing will still be relying on old hardware to run parts of their infrastructure.
Posters on Vogon, a forum dedicated to ancient hardware and emulators that allow you to run old games on newer machines, questioned the move and how much space and storage Intel would really save by the housekeeping measure.
Various people are setting up their own mirrors and using archive.org, but the maker community noted that file names are not always obvious and downloading from mirror sites can be risky.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday November 19 2019, @11:06PM (11 children)
The question is liability and culpability for backdoors and no longer allocating personnel dollars (both in institutional knowledge, ongoing design/revisions, and responsibility to maintenance those pages). But harder on the closure of a liability door. If a project is officially EOL'd then the company is no longer responsible for putting out patches for it. And while they could EOL the product but still leave the last good copies up that still leaves a question which might be litigated. ("See, they left the downloads up for it... so they were still 'maintining' it." Lousy argument but it might be litigable.) Shut the whole thing down and say, "it's gone," and one can't argue in any way that they were still offering maintenance for them.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hartree on Tuesday November 19 2019, @11:17PM (7 children)
I doubt this is that forward thinking. I'm betting a PHB heard they still had ancient drivers around and cried out: "But we want them to upgrade! Take that down. Now!" regardless that it has no bearing at all on current computer users.
Never attribute to well thought out malice what can reasonably be explained by sloth, stupidity, or Pointy Haired Bosses. (But I repeat myself.)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @01:21AM (4 children)
No, GP is right, Intel policy doesn't allow the use of anything that is considered "outdated" for fear of security flaws causing lawsuits. Even sysvinit is banned from use due to it being "old" and "unmaintained", so, pretty much anything that hasn't gotten any new release in the last 6 months.
And yes, older releases do get retroactively declared insecure and removed because a component didn't get any new updates after the release.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday November 20 2019, @02:07PM (3 children)
So if you have old and essentially bug-free software (no known bugs for extended time), you have to keep making pointless updates just to keep it alive?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday November 20 2019, @07:52PM
Have to justify your job somehow, I guess. ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @08:28PM
Why do you think all bug fixes introduce 1-3 new ones? It's not that software developers are bad, or software is hard, they just like job security.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday November 20 2019, @11:02PM
No.
If you have old and essentially bug-free software and still are claiming it is as maintained then one must still be alert to the possibility that it could be compromised. If an entity lists their products as CVE compatible (sometimes a prerequisite for enterprise-level acceptance of packages) one has to have somebody prepared to respond to CVE notices for that piece of software. One has to be prepared to migrate the web support pages when the company buys into a new CMS. One has to nominally assure that the program isn't suffering bit rot from the introduction of unexpected new technologies into an otherwise static environment.
TL/DR: If you claim to be maintaining software... you have to maintain it. (Even if that maintenance consists of no codebase changes).
Corollary: If you keep shit online, you may be establishing prima facie an intent that it is being maintained. Although hopefully your "THIS IS NOW END OF LIFE AND ARCHIVED ONLY" notice will win you the lawsuit, it doesn't stop someone from filing one against you. Especially if you have deep pockets. The deeper the pockets, the more PHB's you must have, sadly. Success breeds bureaucracy.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday November 20 2019, @11:05PM
Yes, also possible. Actually, probably both reasons are correct making it a "win-win" for them (and "lose-lose" for the user whose twenty year old system still faithfully chugs along).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday November 20 2019, @11:18PM
A quick R/L non-software issue.
We have an electrical switching box manufactured over 20 years ago by G.E. as part of a larger system that was, at that time, maintained by G.E. Changes happened, and G.E. was no longer being paid money to maintain the system which needed the switchbox. Other equipment was put in after that box.
Someone came in and did some electrical maintenance for us and it fried a very expensive part inside that box. We managed to get ahold of a genuine G.E. replacement part for the fried component. We tested all other components in that system and determined they were all good - just the one part fried. The company who fried the part (by shorting together two wires that should never have been connected but they thought they knew what those leads did) raised an extreme objection that we were endangering the system by replacing the part.
Sooo..... we tackled the hierarchy at G.E. And managed to speak with the engineering office that still had maintenance authority for the plans for that box. They hadn't been asked a question about these schematics for those plans in five years because that model of box was retired soon after we purchased our installation.... but they still had installations using that box under maintenance. The engineer with oversight responsibility for that box was responsible for periodically re-certifying that the plans were accurate and suitable for applications fitting the required specs. That engineer certified to us, given all the conditions we gave him about our testing and our best suspicions about what happened that installing the replacement part would create no additional hazards. All of that consultation happened to us at no charge, and while G.E. owed us nothing they still took responsibility for the basic workmanship of the twenty year old switchbox and its circuitry. (Although we billed the person who shorted the wires for the replacement part cost).
That was about ten years ago, and that box is still in place doing its job today. I'm sure, if it hasn't already happened, that G.E. will make a cost decision eventually that all remaining installations of that box will need to upgrade or lose their maintenance, those plans will be jettisoned, and the engineering office I spoke with will no longer have responsibility to answer silly questions like ours.
So the point of this is.... point... point? No, I guess I just liked that story. :)
Oh, and sometimes there are internal cost charges to keeping stuff around beyond just a scant amount of power and hard drive space. And PHB's too, granted.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @03:41AM
UUuuuUUUuuu they save 100 MEGAbytes of disk space!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday November 20 2019, @10:23PM (1 child)
>The question is liability and culpability for backdoors
then they would have not shipped the IME, and the BIOS would be updatable only after setting a physical switch, and no EFI, and no integrated radio circuitry, and the BIOS would be 100% mathematically verified, and would be openfirmware because it is already there, working, and free.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday November 20 2019, @10:48PM
You confuse liability with perfection. But I can see where to a Bot that things must either be perfect or offline.
This sig for rent.