I recently had an opportunity to check out a drive-in movie theatre, and was very excited at the idea until I remembered that the FM radio in our car was messed up (we never use it). I dug through the garage and found my old Walkman still in a pile of high school stuff. Cleaned it up, installed batteries, cycled the volume rheostat until it was cleaned up and the static stopped...and POOF perfect FM radio again! I brought headphones and had a great time.
This was an issue long before 1984. It's shocking by today's standards, but the portable transistor radios dating from the 1950s never received any security updates in their lifetime!
Yes, I confess that I was just riffing on cbm-vic-20's clever comment.
An original Sony Walkman had nothing in it that could ever require a "security update". It had no network access, no wireless connection, and as far as I know no microprocessor, nothing that could ever enable someone to hack into it - unless they had physical access and were skilled at soldering.
Even more so, the transistor radios from the 1950s were just simple circuits with as few as five transistors. Now these were radio receivers, so by modern standards you might worry about someone hacking into them. But with five transistors all soldered together on a simple circuit board, it would be difficult for an attacker to send a signal that would somehow reprogram the radio.
Maybe a lightning bolt though! That could cause a permanent denial of service.
Painfully funny joke. I've got a little chefs steps sous vide that will become worthless the day the company goes out of business and the app is pulled from the store. Despite just needing a temperature and time setting it relies on a phone app and somehow requires an update every single time I use it =/
The authors spoke a common notion on how there exists no valid excuse for the prevalence of "mandatory security updates" for appliances by shedding light on how few (possibly zero) of these gadgets from a bygone era possessed either firmware or the need to "update" it.
NASA Apollo 13 team did intentionally brick S-IVB upperstage radio downlink so that frequency auto-calibration goes way off so it won’t interfere with the rescue operation.
That auto-calibration system probably was a series of analog opamp circuits, so if that’s the case they managed to OTA brick a complex enough analog radio.
Just to be a pedant, the android phone I am typing this on is also made entirely out of electrical and electronic parts as well. In fact, arguably this device contains a greater degree of those parts, as the only electromechanical parts are speakers, a vibration motor, and 3 tact switches.
A simple radio will have a speaker, slide switch for power, potentiometer for volume, and either a potentiometer or variable cap for tuning.
Although I do agree, the operative words there are 'simple' and 'no firmware'. ;)
It would be entirely analogue in the signal path; radios didn't become digital until DAB. Although some acquired microprocessor front panel controls in maybe the 90s.
Way to go. :-) You reminded me, I bought a couple of those little rechargeable FM transmitters recently and was surprised to find that they're so much simpler than Bluetooth in a lot of ways. I haven't used any of my portable BT speakers in a few weeks now, because it's easier to pipe audio from my phone through to a nearby radio.
