Corrupted firmware? What had to get re-flashed on OS install?

Yeah, that sounds rather dubious to me. It seems far more likely something went wrong with the EFI partition and someone involved in the process managed to get those concepts confused.

... maybe. Check with your provider. If not, it's worth a mention that LineageOS builds of Oreo are being produced for some older devices, though the list for Samsung is pretty darned short so far. If you just want Android 7, the supported list is MUCH longer.

I can see the argument, though my reading of the BSD license would suggest so long as the text is present in the IME binaries that's enough. No actual need to display them to the user. Consider the Win95 TCP/IP stack as an example. So far as I recall, the minimum notices were present in the binaries, and nothing else was ever done. Taking it further, If the binaries are obfuscated in some way in the main BIOS image prior to being loaded to IME at boot (say, compressed) then the license is probably still satisfied and the user is never notified. Scummy? Arguably. Breach of terms? Probably not.

Lawl. You seem a bit confused. That's criminal trial only. Civil suits the standard is only 'a preponderance of evidence.' Of course, none of that applies here, as this is all voluntary action from Kaspersky, in response to accusations. And also, of course, they still get to deal with The Court of Public Opinion, where the standard of evidence is more like 'She looks like witch! Does she weigh as much as as duck? BURN HER!'

What I get for skimming through too quickly. Oops. Still, ~4 yrs is a longer than most manufacturers support anything lately. Which sucks, is sad, condolences, etc.

Been hibernating a while? 6 and 6A have been ratified, 6e isn't a standard though.

Great! Now to get manufacturers to provide, if not push, updates on those devices. Best of luck!

Expecting updates on a mobile device made ten years ago? What the hell you smokin? Sure, nowadays that's not quite so unreasonable as the pace of hardware improvement slows, but I don't expect manufacturer's to get in line any sooner than they're forced to. Hell, I'd even settle for allowing unlocking of EOL'd devices and pushing 'em to something like Lineage when available.

Yes, Slashdot has not entirely lost the pedantic jackassery that was part of making it great back in the time before time.
Someone wake me up when Natalie, statues, and hot grits come back in style though.

Logical fallacy in play - because a past abuse was not punished should not prevent new abuses from being punished.

Off-topic here, but ... can Rust do cross compiling? If so, add an output target for the new platform, cross compile, test. Less work if you can get away with it. If not, more work, yay!

Way off topic here, but that's a non-sequitur - it does not follow that Venezuela's problems stem entirely from socialism. A very large chunk is directly attributable to the country's economy being almost entirely based on petroleum exports in a fucked up market.