One thing that would be useful to understand is the distinction between CMR and SMR

I got a nice deal on the x280 and am happy with it, was also looking at the various X1 carbon. Two criteria I had were I wanted USB-C charging (since I have those chargers around and they can handle these laptops) and a single battery (eg. the T470s I have from work is nice but it has two small capacity batteries that each cost the same to replace as the full size single ones in the carbon and x280). One thing to keep in mind is some of the earlier X1 carbon don’t support NVME SSD (I think it started with 5th gen?)

Edit: another thing to consider is soldered RAM. Part of why my x280 was cheap was it’s only 8gb and can’t be upgraded. Since you’re looking at lighter weight things and using FOSS (and perhaps open to tinkering with things like ZRAM) that might be a useful aspect to focus on because there is probably a glut of such machines given how memory inefficient things are lately with every trivial app running a whole browser engine. OTOH, depending how many tabs you tend to have open and how many electron apps you tend to keep floating around, 8gb might start to feel cramped. Especially if you think you might want some VMs around.

Next time I look for a small laptop to have handy one thing I’m going to be sure to prioritise is: how much battery does it use while suspended? I’d really like to not need to have it switch to hibernate after 30m of sleep or w/e and ideally just plug it in overnight like a phone.

Big fan of that one, been using it for years.

https://explainshell.com/

The app, in the scenario where we’re trusting the author/store, is only part of the surface to the extent it’s exposed to a potentially malicious payload. eg. a trusted solitaire game using a vulnerable API doesn’t exacerbate that vulnerability because it doesn’t expose it to untrusted input whereas a PDF viewer would because the PDF could be coming from anywhere…

Really appreciate you taking the time to write that. I have a sense of most of that (“defense in depth” and “threat model” are good lenses to think about such things through for sure!) but what I was trying to get a better grasp on was how much risk from automated attack was a normal person without worries of an “advanced persistent threat” taking on by using a device past EOL. Like you say, “Quantifying how much of a difference it makes is not trivial” so I feel less conflicted to know that you’re comfortable with your dad taking that risk.

I would think that the main thing at stake for a typical user isn’t just browsing history or email though but rather identity theft since a successful attacker can use the device to get through 2FA.

I don’t think they are things that can be fixed on the app level?

Indeed not. So I’m trying to better understand how vulnerabilities at the system level are exploited. It seems like the attack surface is limited to RF (bluetooth/wifi can be turned off if one is willing to make that compromise), app install (many just use a small selection of well-trusted apps), and messaging/browser which are regularly updated if the device is properly configured.

Based on this thread I’m beginning to form the opinion that it is not unreasonably foolhardy for someone to continue to use an unsupported device if they are willing to make the compromises necessary to limit their attack surface.

Thanks, that’s encouraging and very relevant. Looks like it was introduced in Android 10 and aside from “Project Mainline” is referred to as “modular system components”: https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/modular-system

Can you shed more light on what someone would be risking by continuing to use an EOL device? You say you don’t advise it, but it’d be helpful to elaborate on why.

It seems like the increased vulnerability would be relatively limited: I presume the browser and messaging are by far the most common vectors and those would be as up to date as ever but I can see how exploiting an unpatched vuln there on an unsupported device could have more impact as it would give more options for privilege escalation.

Otherwise it’d be something RF based. Aside from widely publicised things like BlueBorne (that we should be keeping an eye out for anyway), is it a reasonable concern that there are identify theft rings employing people with modified hardware wandering around subway systems trying to exfiltrate credentials from devices with specific vulnerable basebands? Seems like Android also offers some defence in depth there that’d make it unlikely enough to ensure it wouldn’t be worth their while?

There are a few technologically disinterested people in my life that I advise (as is no doubt the case for many here) and I don’t know how strongly to push for them to get new devices once theirs fall out of support. Most of them are quite content with what they’re using and are not in the habit of installing apps (and will reliably ask me first) so they really would be replacing the device solely for the updates. In some cases it’s not only the time and effort to decide on a replacement and get things transferred over but the expense can also be a burden. So I don’t want to raise the alarm lightly.

Aren’t you sorta trusting whoever wrote any package you install with root? I mean, you should have that attitude anyhow as packages have a huge attack surface so privilege escalation bugs are way more common than remote execution but still, flatpak and snap at least offer a bit of a sandbox which might improve…