Will Cooke
An engineer who spent years as Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical, leading the team behind the Ubuntu desktop experience, and now works on...
“There will be all of those routers out there, the no-brand routers or the cheap imported Chinese routers that are given away with home internet connections, that never get a firmware update, that are going to have these certs baked into them.”
Late Night Linux · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
Context
The hosts were discussing compromised TLS certificates. Browsers can revoke them with an update, but Will points out that devices with hard-coded certificates and no firmware updates will keep trusting them.
Transcript
Yeah.
So, you're probably talking about millions of Docker images, millions of packages. It's a proper colossal fuck-up.
And there will be all of those routers out there, like the sort of no-brand routers or the cheap imported Chinese routers that are given away with home internet connections that never get a firmware update that are going to have these certs baked into them.
It's almost like we should have some form of, like, I don't know, a system of releasing packages for an entire OS, and all the other packages could look into that package to get a shared set of information. I don't know. I don't think it'll work.
That's never going to work with modern paradigms, Phelan.
It's just annoying. Like, it's like, ah, it's all fucked.
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