Technology

I would prefer if they force the companies to unlock root and boot-loader, when they not ship security updates anymore for a device.

15 is an arbitrarily long time. I think forcing it to be open sourced upon the companies end of life is the better option

Or legislate that unsupported software becomes public domain or is open for development and the public can try and make the updates themselves.

Forcing people to upgrade entirely depends on the nature of the upgrades and the motive of the company. What we need is competition so there are alternatives for people to use if they don't want to upgrade. But somehow Microsoft is not considered the monopoly of the PC OS market, despite being a monopoly, and uses that position to force changes nobody wants but them, like turning window into an AI data farming scheme that violates user privacy.

That sounds like an insane duration, even LTS distros are not usually anything like 15 years

What we REALLY need is to curb microsoft’s market dominance. If more alternatives for OS and usable replacements for MS office em would exist, this would not be a problem and would not need to hamper innovation for the sake of back porting (the main counter-argument as a dev).

This is stupid.

15 years is a massive time to just update your OS.

15 years ago instagram didn’t exist, the iPad was new, and people were just updating from Vista to Windows 7. I think Hadoop was just created then.

That is a massive amount of time to support software that would have almost no architectural protection against things like heartbleed.

Please mandate open bootloaders on devices, that's what we truly need.

Dude, I’m so ready. Linux supports processors that old, by enthusiasts for free.

15 years is too long, it doesn't match the state of the industry or technological progress.

If anything this slows down innovation which leads me to suspect the 15 year idea was though of by someone who dislikes any technical changes.

Just require any new operating systems to support 15 year old hardware. We should require manufacturers to provide 15 years of UEFI and firmware updates too.

No, OS makers should just not make their OS bloated with useless shit, stealing your data and have arbitrary system requirements. I think 15 years of OS updates is excessive unless we're talking about servers or very specific workflows. IMO 5-10 years is enough.

That said, for some operating systems it doesn't even make sense to support for THAT long, because how they are designed (A lot of Linux distros for example). It turns out, if you don't break users' workflow, they don't mind to upgrade.

Nothing says ‘circular economy’ like Microsoft stranding 400 million PCs

This might be a silly question but would this not be a good idea for a start up company that recycle computer parts?

Of course. Make another regulation only big corps can follow. To punish them, of course. This is punishment.

This seems backwards. Let's just assume we're always going to be willingly beholden to tech giants, and so we're going to pass a law to make our masters treat us well.

Maybe instead campaign for a law that says all publicly funded computer resources must be reliably usable for 15 years. So you either go FOSS and save money too, or you get guarantees in writing before you hand over your hand over money to the people who won't even let you see what their code is doing on your hardware.

Microsoft's plan to end Windows 10 support next month — which may make an estimated 400 million PCs obsolete

I don't get this. Can't those PCs update to the new version? Yes, I am very aware that win11 is a shit show and win10 was better.

But Ubuntu also has a similar support policy for updates:

Ubuntu LTS versions get five years of updates, while non-LTS only gets nine months.

Would all the Linux versions out there be subjected the same 15 years of updates??

What would that mean for Linux distros? It seems like it could be a law that cuts off the competition. Like amazon who is very selectively for better working conditions when the know that no competitior can fulfull them.

If the EU is going to pay for the developers, sure. I’d even go higher and say make it 50 years. Otherwise make your own OS or use Linux.

I think Microsoft should be punished with forcing to release the Windows kernel source code.

This is a prime example of legislators not understanding technology.

European e-waste campaigners are calling on EU leadership to force tech vendors to provide 15 years of software updates, using Microsoft's plan to end Windows 10 support next month — which may make an estimated 400 million PCs obsolete — as a textbook case of avoidable e-waste.

Windows 10 has already had 10 years of support. ESU extends this one extra year. If you have hardware that cannot meet Windows 11's requirements, there are other OSes available that will happily run on that hardware. Which is what brings us to the real issue.

Microsoft's near monopoly on consumer grade PCs and Apple's vendor lock in. This is the core issue.

Companies can do this because there are no regulations to stop them. We call on European Commissioner Jessika Roswall to introduce EU Ecodesign requirements for laptops, guaranteeing at least 15 years of software updates. No more devices designed to break or become obsolete before their time

Ten years is a very long time for support. If you need support past that length, you need a different OS. Apple does good to keep Macs made in the last five to seven years still able to run their newest OS. They are some of the worse offenders on this. But even with a different OS, there's still a limit to how far you can take hardware. You could put the best optimized software on really old hardware and that won't change that the underlying CPU is old.

The older hardware gets the harder it is to keep supporting it. Case in point, there reason you can't get TLS 1.2 that pretty much every site now requires onto Windows 95 era machine is the underlying hardware cannot keep up with the required computational needs to support that encryption. And if you happened to install Windows 95 onto modern hardware, the number of changes to the OS to get access to the underlying hardware is pretty much an upgrade to Windows 7.

Ten year old machines are doing alright for the time being, but we have to move on. TLS 1.3 is here, has been here since 2018. The stricter requirements for security, require more advanced hardware.

And I just mention TLS as a single example of what we're talking about here. Modern hardware advances and attackers and users get those at the same time. While software security schemes do ensure security long after the hardware has become dated, there's a point where it won't matter anymore what software you toss onto the machine. It's just so out dated it doesn't matter, no software is securing it. Now that's usually a lot longer than ten years, but it's not much longer.

You can take a very lightweight Linux distro and pop it onto a Pentium 3 machine. It will technically run. But you are lacking SSE2 and even if you recompiled to remove SSE2 optimizations and strictly held to 586 ISA, you're not going to enjoy the performance on the machine. For even the most simple tasks like unpacking a 7-zip. You will fare very unwell to some attacker who has a modern Threadripper machine.

I love old machines but the rest of the world is moving forward. Yes, software could technically cover for more than ten years, but not much more. But it's silly to think that a Athlon 64 (2003), the oldest CPU you can technically get working on Windows 10 because of the NX bit requirement, would be able to keep pace on today's multi megabyte sized website. Hell even the X2 models that were the first to be "dual core" would have issues with how modern web browsers handle things because Athlon 64 X2's model for multiple processors is vastly different than how modern CPUs do it. It wouldn't take anything for someone to feed it a website that would bring the system to it's knees.

The thing is 15 years a very long time in the world of technology that's ever evolving. Software can only go so far. 15 years is absolutely you need a different OS if that's your requirement territory. But when you start hitting 20 years, your going to see breakage no matter what software you throw at it. It might be very slight at the 20 year mark. but each year after that it's going to become more pronounced.

This comes after e-waste watchers revealed that 75 million iPhones could be rendered obsolete – tipping the scales at around 1.2 million kilograms of e-waste – following the release of iOS 26.

Not strictly true because the phones they counted here will still get security updates for 2-3 years AFAIK. 7 year old phones, mind you. But yeah, no more feature updates. Which are so meaningless these days anyway.