It does look great, and I’d be quite tempted by a few, but I’d quibble with the ‘heirloom’ term. There were two ways of getting images onto it, either a network connection or an SD card. SD cards have been around for a while but 20-30 years is a long time for any removable storage system. Floppy disks were common 30 years ago and are basically gone now. Compact Flash didn’t last long. CD and DVD optical media seem to have gone from most laptops now, though you can still get the drives. CD-ROMs only became common in the mid ‘90s, DVDs in the early ‘00s and CDs only lasted as long as they have because DVD drives were backwards compatible.
For the network, WiFi standards evolve and, especially, the encryption does. A device for, 20 years ago would have used WEP and 802.11b. Modern APs often disable 802.11b by default (it slows down modern devices and most surviving old things are at least .g) and won’t support WEP. WPA2 is gradually being superseded by WPA3. For both the WiFi and TLS layer, the key exchange protocol is likely to be replaced by something using post-quantum crypto in the next decade and the ESP32 doesn’t have enough RAM for any of the proposed post-quantum algorithms (you probably could AES+PSK for TLS, if the server supports it).
It looks like it probably could do five years with only modest security updates (an embedded network stack will almost certainly have at least one vulnerability that you want to patch to avoid ending up in the next Mirai botnet), and gradually fade towards incompatibility with modem infrastructure over the next five. That’s still a big step up from most consumer electronics but not really something that would be useful to your grandchildren.
As for all the other tech, it’s not like this thing needs to be super secure. If it only supports physical access and short-range comms like Wi-Fi, it’s not going to get goatse’d by someone from across the globe with an IP scanner. Add on a physical Wi-Fi switch and it won’t be useful for any kind of botnet.
The last “prosumer” DSLR from Nikon (the D850) has SD and XQD slots.
The pro D5 has one CF slot and one XQD slot.
The Z9 (pro mirrorless) has has CFExpress and XQD. The corresponding Canon model, the R3, has CFexpress and SD slots.
The Sony Alpha 9 has dual SD slots.
Quoting El Wik
[XQD] cards are not backward compatible with CompactFlash or CFast cards […]. XQD and CFast were both designed as a replacement of the 1994 CompactFlash standard.
The format was first announced in November 2010 by SanDisk, Sony and Nikon, and was immediately picked up by the CompactFlash Association for development. The final specification was announced in December 2011.
On 7 September 2016 the CFA announced the successor of XQD, CFexpress. This new standard uses the same form-factor and interface but uses the NVMe protocol for higher speeds, lower latencies and lower power consumption.
Fair enough, it survives in a niche. I haven’t seen a CF card for years, whereas 20 years ago a load of consumer devices used it.
As for all the other tech, it’s not like this thing needs to be super secure. If it only supports physical access and short-range comms like Wi-Fi, it’s not going to get goatse’d by someone from across the globe with an IP scanner. Add on a physical Wi-Fi switch and it won’t be useful for any kind of botnet.
The fact that it’s only on briefly is probably the main reason it isn’t useful in a botnet (send a few packets in your DDoS and the capacitor runs out). The rest isn’t really true. WiFi security gets upgraded periodically and leaving holes in your WiFi security for an old device is a bad idea. The threat model for local networks is now often that someone gets some limited privilege on a mobile device that has access to the network. You get someone to install some game that requests local network access, it then finds exploitable IoT devices and compromises them in every WiFi network that they join. Now, you could run a separate WiFi network for this, but now the low-power bit isn’t particularly interesting because you have a few Watts of always-on base station for the few second a day that this machine is on.
This sort of heirloom electronics would be such an amazing product! I’d take at least six, for the whole family.
It does look great, and I’d be quite tempted by a few, but I’d quibble with the ‘heirloom’ term. There were two ways of getting images onto it, either a network connection or an SD card. SD cards have been around for a while but 20-30 years is a long time for any removable storage system. Floppy disks were common 30 years ago and are basically gone now. Compact Flash didn’t last long. CD and DVD optical media seem to have gone from most laptops now, though you can still get the drives. CD-ROMs only became common in the mid ‘90s, DVDs in the early ‘00s and CDs only lasted as long as they have because DVD drives were backwards compatible.
For the network, WiFi standards evolve and, especially, the encryption does. A device for, 20 years ago would have used WEP and 802.11b. Modern APs often disable 802.11b by default (it slows down modern devices and most surviving old things are at least .g) and won’t support WEP. WPA2 is gradually being superseded by WPA3. For both the WiFi and TLS layer, the key exchange protocol is likely to be replaced by something using post-quantum crypto in the next decade and the ESP32 doesn’t have enough RAM for any of the proposed post-quantum algorithms (you probably could AES+PSK for TLS, if the server supports it).
It looks like it probably could do five years with only modest security updates (an embedded network stack will almost certainly have at least one vulnerability that you want to patch to avoid ending up in the next Mirai botnet), and gradually fade towards incompatibility with modem infrastructure over the next five. That’s still a big step up from most consumer electronics but not really something that would be useful to your grandchildren.
Huh? It’s still widely used for DSLRs.
As for all the other tech, it’s not like this thing needs to be super secure. If it only supports physical access and short-range comms like Wi-Fi, it’s not going to get goatse’d by someone from across the globe with an IP scanner. Add on a physical Wi-Fi switch and it won’t be useful for any kind of botnet.
Nah, CF is pretty much dead.
The last “prosumer” DSLR from Nikon (the D850) has SD and XQD slots.
The pro D5 has one CF slot and one XQD slot.
The Z9 (pro mirrorless) has has CFExpress and XQD. The corresponding Canon model, the R3, has CFexpress and SD slots.
The Sony Alpha 9 has dual SD slots.
Quoting El Wik
Fair enough, it survives in a niche. I haven’t seen a CF card for years, whereas 20 years ago a load of consumer devices used it.
The fact that it’s only on briefly is probably the main reason it isn’t useful in a botnet (send a few packets in your DDoS and the capacitor runs out). The rest isn’t really true. WiFi security gets upgraded periodically and leaving holes in your WiFi security for an old device is a bad idea. The threat model for local networks is now often that someone gets some limited privilege on a mobile device that has access to the network. You get someone to install some game that requests local network access, it then finds exploitable IoT devices and compromises them in every WiFi network that they join. Now, you could run a separate WiFi network for this, but now the low-power bit isn’t particularly interesting because you have a few Watts of always-on base station for the few second a day that this machine is on.