Why did apple have a 30-pin dock connector if USB can do everything?
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/yxrfu/comment/c5zw18d/
Why does Apple have a 30 pin connector anyway?

USB is a stack of protocols which is over complicated. Many USB implementations are riddled with bugs and people are used to just "disconnect and...

reddit
@SwiftOnSecurity in the middle of a industrial embedded USB deprecation because of this
@SwiftOnSecurity sometimes field techs need to plug in a usb, and if the device has been on for months, something fails to recognize the connection and requires a reboot, but it’s been on so long because it needs constant uptime, so my coworker had to sit at 3am while a team rebooted it in the middle of the night to make usb work again

@lampsofgold @SwiftOnSecurity rebooting is dangerous, what if the device doesn’t come back up!?
Uptime: 10y237d56m12s

Date last patched: 💩

@u3b3rg33k @lampsofgold @SwiftOnSecurity I wish people didn’t show uptime like this and brag about it. “I am exploitable” is not something to brag about. “My system is designed so that it can’t be patched” even less.

@malwareminigun @lampsofgold @SwiftOnSecurity I’ve had two bad experiences with excessive uptime worthy of note.
1: my sendmail box at about 5 years. Failed on reboot due to boot sector corruption

2: someone (NOT ME) power cycled a DC. An old Cisco box that everyone was afraid to reboot… didn’t. Said box was a major single point of failure, too.

@SwiftOnSecurity @malwareminigun @lampsofgold @u3b3rg33k No long uptime in my case, but there was a time we were upgrading a firewall in our data center. We switched to the new firewall and some things weren’t working quite right, so we were going to switch back to the old one so we could work out the issues in a leisurely manner. It wouldn’t boot up anymore. We ended up having to work out the issues with the new one right then and there.
@malwareminigun @u3b3rg33k @lampsofgold @SwiftOnSecurity in industry it is not about bragging. It is about maintaining critical systems that are so old they were never intended to be connected or require patches as a results of said connection in the first place.
As a former field tech I've lost count of the number of rs232 to ethernet on a cellular vpn that I've put in place just to follow with the IIoT hype.
@lampsofgold @SwiftOnSecurity they got to wait until 0300 on the same day/night for a spontaneous maintenance window?
Pure luxury! I was stuck on "sure, after the mandatory two weeks" or "it's this one weekend every three/six months" several times when things broke in not-yet-critical ways.
@RichiH no lol it was scheduled
@lampsofgold @SwiftOnSecurity I wonder how much of this is endemic to USB as a spec (not that you need to follow the spec) or is a problem of the USB stack implementation (assuming, via a miracle, everything else follows the USB spec)
@lampsofgold @SwiftOnSecurity I'm curious what the range of attractive alternatives are? I guess my first instinct would be "attach something which can speak Ethernet and TCP/IP to it". Ideally a SBC maybe so it can have an OS on there.
@0x2ba22e11 yeah it's already networked, so we're just going to do that instead. It's on an SBC that's pretty well connected, the USB is just a kludge I inherited that we hopefully won't need anymore
@lampsofgold thanks. Best of luck to you, hope your project goes smoothly. :)
@0x2ba22e11 Thanks! We actually found an issue right before the holiday break that I can't reproduce; I found a fix for it, but the fix is persistent across what I thought was a factory reset, so I get to do some weird debugging in Q1 lol