On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Matthias Andree wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Stephen Frost wrote:
>
> > Default the jumper in the other direction then. Then those
> > that are clueful can protect themselves if they feel it neccessary
> > and the rest don't have to worry about it. Of course, the first
> > time a virus comes through and blows away everything the vendors may
> > perhaps change their mind. Of course, this hasn't happened in any
> > of the many years this ability has been around so I'm not sure there
> > is exactly much cause for alarm.
>
> A virus that would not reveal its nature is rather pointless, and it
> took quite some time until CIH showed up, but I'm pretty sure that an
> E-Mail or some other virus will show up that strides to grind the disk
> into pieces. Lusers don't need to update disk drive firmware,
> particularly not without removing or setting Jumpers.
We'll see. I would tend to agree w/ your comment that generally
people aren't going to be upgrading the firmware on their hard drives
unless they know enough to change a jumper on the drive. Of course this
is all basically academic until something happens that will convince the
drive manufactures to not allow their drives to be destroyed through this
'feature'.
> Ever considered why now there are DualBIOS and the like? To keep things
> steady with frequent BIOS flashes, have live backups in case flashing
> goes wrong.
Yes, too bad drives don't have this, at least not yet. We can
hope though.
> Impending support costs for firmware updates may improve firmware
> quality BEFORE delivery - at least for some manufacturers.
That'd be a change...
Stephen
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 31 2000 - 21:00:16 EST