Re: Accidental Aardvark
I'm sure if Windows had ever killed your BIOS, you would have been rushing to blame Intel or Lenovo .....
This has shades of an issue from several years ago, with some read-only optical drives taking liberties with the standards. They used the "write" instruction to initiate a firmware upgrade. Some Linux distributions used a hardware detection tool that attempted to determine whether an optical drive was read-only or write-capable by attempting a write operation. Nothing would actually be written to the disc, since the first block of data would contain a deliberate error. A writable drive should respond "OK, begin sending data", accept the data and then bomb out with a checksum error. A read-only drive should respond to the "write" instruction with "command not recognised" ..... Unless it was falsely interpreting the "write" instruction to mean "new firmware coming up" and responding "OK, begin sending data" ..... then overwriting the beginning of its own firmware with the test data .....
It could happen with any Operating System -- even Mac OS, since even Apple can't always control all their upstream suppliers. All it takes is for two people to interpret the wording of a standard differently, or one to ignore it completely .....
Somebody should have to take responsibility for this; but everybody has a good case for pointing the finger at somebody else, and it's the users who end up suffering.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
