This implies a lot of infected machines. As I mentioned earlier, machines getting uninfected at every reboot will reduce the number of infected machines at any point in time. It may reduce it far enough to provide "herd immunity", which is why we only need 90% of the population immunized against measles to prevent it from propagating.
Furthermore, if people are aware that reboots will de-infect malware, machines can be set up to regularly reboot. For example, I could set up my router to reboot once an hour. This would be only a minor inconvenience, as it reboots pretty quickly.
Regular reboot can be done by adding one of those simple hardware store lamp timers, or the device itself can contain a hardware circuit (outside of software control) to regularly reboot it.
By the way, do your really want automatic updates to your disk drive firmware? Your USB stick firmware? I don't. They don't happen anyway, yet I've seen articles about how those get infected with malware.
This implies a lot of infected machines. As I mentioned earlier, machines getting uninfected at every reboot will reduce the number of infected machines at any point in time. It may reduce it far enough to provide "herd immunity", which is why we only need 90% of the population immunized against measles to prevent it from propagating.
Furthermore, if people are aware that reboots will de-infect malware, machines can be set up to regularly reboot. For example, I could set up my router to reboot once an hour. This would be only a minor inconvenience, as it reboots pretty quickly.
Regular reboot can be done by adding one of those simple hardware store lamp timers, or the device itself can contain a hardware circuit (outside of software control) to regularly reboot it.
By the way, do your really want automatic updates to your disk drive firmware? Your USB stick firmware? I don't. They don't happen anyway, yet I've seen articles about how those get infected with malware.