This was covered in the UK Column News of Weds 1 February and may not be quite as bad as it sounded upon first hearing. Potentially bad though and analogous to what the NCSC are up to - see below.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) will be running a certification programme for UK institutions (companies, colleges, schools, universities, and larger unincorporated agencies - I forget the exact criteria as I don’t need to remember this stuff anymore as part of work requirements).
Certification is not required, as such, but lack of it will be used against you. The organisation must prove that all of the software on every workstation is properly licensed, fully up-to-date, and ‘secure’. Ostensibly this is to protect us (of course) from online harms disseminated via dodgy software. Those Russians and Iranians huh.
In effect, what it means is that any software that is no longer supported is liable to be held to be insecure, regardless of whether it really is. It also means IT depts will centralise software on application servers and move toward ‘thin client’ style computing. Not a bad thing because savings can be made on hardware. Which is just as well as the software makers will be ripping you off good and proper.
So, for example, my erstwhile IT department decided it would no longer support open-ended Adobe software licenses. This is because Adobe themselves have essentially declared the apps as abandonware: if it goes wrong don’t come crying to us.
Thus every user would have to have the subscription version which is £70 p.a. or thereabouts. Similarly, any unsupported version of Linux would be automatically suspect. Last I heard Ubuntu LTS (Long-Term Support) version would be okay but not anything else, apart from ‘branched’ enterprise versions, that charge a licensing fee. Red Hat is the key example.
It’s worth keeping an eye on this agenda just as we might the Online Harms Bill because relatively small tweaks to legislation can have far-reaching, and expensive, effects. All to keep us safe.
Thought experiment: If we’re all to live in 15-minute cities why should our sat nav apps (including the ones in in our non-existent cars) show us anything outside that radius. A grey void marked Here Be Dragons perhaps?