[Discuss] Updating firmware

[Randall Rose]

Good comment.  

I appreciate the helpful suggestions from multiple people.  Though I believe firmware compromises are quite rare at the moment, I don't know whether that will be true in future, and I find it worth learning more about what can be done to be safer.

Of course chips and architectures COULD be designed so that it's simple to check that a particular machine is in a good state as long as you have a trusted machine to check it with.  But we're not there now.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2026, at 3:09 AM, markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
>>> This is going to sound depressing, but the only way to know for sure is
>>> to
>>> pop the eeprom and program it with an external programmer.
>>
>> As someone who flashes a lot of laptop firmware roms, it's really not
>> that bad. The soic-8 flash chips are not hard to remove with a $40 hot
>> air station, and you can rewrite them with flashrom on a raspberry pi,
>> a breadboard, some jumper wires, and a $10 clip. Takes a few hours to
>> do the first time, but you get the hang pretty quick.
>>
>> -Ben
>>
> Been there, done that, but .....
>
> The point is that not everyone has the wherewithal or inclination.
>
> This gets me off on a tangent. If you look at the history of any
> mechanization, like the rise of the automobile, or the rise of the
> computer, camera, etc. There is a primitive stage where "nerds" do this.
> There is an intermediate stage where less nerdy nerds try to bring this to
> the general population. (early adopters) Then then the stage of techy
> non-nerds pick up on the nerds and capitalize on the nerdy ambitions and
> subvert them to marketing stuff and gets really close to what people want
> and use. (breaking success) Then the last stage where the MBAs with no
> knowledge or respect of the technology create a system where users walk
> away because it no longer does what it did or what they hoped.