So your results are biased, because you're not going to see the decent programmers who are just using it to take mundane tasks off their back (like generating boilerplate functions) while staying in control of the logic. You're only ever going to catch the noobs trying to cheat without fully understanding what it is they're doing.
If every time an OS had to delete something it had to fill the space with zeros or garbage data multiple times just to make extra sure it's gone, we'd all be trashing our flash chips very fast, and performance would be heavily degraded. There really isn't a way around this.
The solution to keep private files private is to put them into an encrypted container of some sort where you control the keys.
What makes you think there’s no way of updating the firmware?
I don't know, but the amount of USB drives I've seen with a readily identifiable serial or jtag port and API documentation is exactly zero. 😉
I think most of them were one-and-done, as in, code/hardware was designed once, and never iterated on again, at least not for devices already in the field.
Wonder what the reason was for so much being in raw assembly when C existed. A basic library/API would be one of the first things I'd tackle in an OS. Move on to a higher level as soon as you're able.
Meredith Whitaker, the president of Signal, said “I keep brooding on the way the xz backdoor was enabled in significant part via weaponizing the FOSS [free and open source software culture of shitty behavior and abuse.”
“What is striking is that the uncool, mean standards of FOSS conduct that many of us have decried for years, and that many defended as authentic, tough, etc., ended up not just being exclusionary loser behavior, but a significant attack surface.”
Emphasis mine.
A software economy based around sharing and openness is not compatible with whatever the fuck you want it to be. If you want decent, secure software, provided for free, then be a decent human.