No, a lot of it is human - asking for things, getting things.

NTSB's M.O. has always been that there is never just one cause. A human mistake that costs lives is never that simple. There is a system that trained the person, a set of incentives that put the person into that place, a set of safeguards that should have existed to prevent the mistake from causing life loss, and a regulatory framework to occasionally verify all of the above. I would expect that "the controller made a mistake" would be ~one paragraph in a 100-page report.

In so far as I cook myself? Yes

We are in violent agreement. And precisely because there is no simple solution to it, half-measures like what is proposed here do absolutely no good, and often times do harm.

If only somebody could make a firmware that claims to have accepted the update, but then proceeds to not actually update itself. Read out the version string from the update and save it. Show that when asked what your version is.

Yes. But a lot of people still got cars that were not as represented. So if we follow the same pattern, somebody will go to jail, but most routers will not be running verified or safe code.

That proves that the one they checked, had the correct firmware. It does not prove that the one from the next batch that you bought did. We are all technical people here we and understand that there isn’t really an easy way to do this that a random non-technical person could actually understand and use.

problem is: how do you prove the firmware in the flash chip matches source? And I do not mean me, with a disassembler and a pi pico to read out the flash chip. I mean the 70-yaer-old corner shop owner that buys this router to provide free WiFi for customers?

And the original article shows you how that is going