Is that really true? Would it connect to 802.11m WiFi router? Would you consider it secure enough to open your banking website on it? The bar is not just booting up the machine. The bar is whether the machine is usable (secure).
Sure. It's using OS networking APIs. Or running in a virtual machine.
> Would you consider it secure enough to open your banking website on it?
If I'm running 20 year old software, it's probably to interact with a legacy system. There are still businesses that run on like 486's with Windows 3.1. This is more common than you think!
> The bar is whether the machine is usable (secure).
The bar is whatever I WANT it to be, it's my machine, and it's pretentious of a software developer to assume they know what I'm using the software for and what my best interests are. For all they know I'm using the software in a museum, 20 years from now, about this era of computing.
I think that's a reasonable point of view. However, for such users, it's best not to use software that's largely developed for masses who just expect the software to work. It might be best to just checkout the source code, and build your own binary. Sorry for being rude :(
And then you'll simulate a time appropriate for the device/software. As a date before 2038 to not have unix time overflow. Or 2000. Or any other time specific bug.
Or how often did you have to "fix the internet" for one of your relatives because their damn CMOS battery died? Yeah, time seems to be quite relevant for trust.
And I don't even like mozilla enforcing signatures for addons that strongly, but people can go overboard.
Some software lives a LONG time and it's fine, and it's up to the user whether that software is still useful to them or not.
Seriously how many posts do we see on hacker news about like "We rebuilt this ancient machine from the 1970s to learn about it." People care about computing history. Not everyone, but there's no reason to force your software to break because the calendar rolls over. Remember Y2K? Things often live a LONG time. People are still actively writing Fortran and COBOL. The short-sightedness of this is amazing, as is the condescending "we know what's best for you" security argument.
So a secure system would let you run Doom, but could forbid:'
- Access to the filesystem outside the application domain due to potential for exfiltrating or destroying user data
- Likewise, access to global system data may be limited
- Access to the network due to (raw TCP/UDP) traffic not having been audited for security, and the network connectivity being usable for exfiltration
- Access to run full-screen due to the ability to perform user phishing attacks by presenting fake UI.
- The ability to disable system-registered keyboard sequences (on windows, such as the windows key or sticky keys)
- Access to mouse events outside its window
- Access to key scan data, although this likely will be emulated
- Access to change display color modes to e.g. 256 color indexed, although this will likely be emulated as well