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Return with me to the Glory Days of Windows XP, which apparently some people, somehow, are still using even though support for it ended in...2014. If it is broke, why fix it?
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The real XP percentage might be higher than reported. The figures are probably based on information gathered from the web. In the days when I was using XP, the great majority of my PC use was offline. Essentially, I read email, not much more. We frowned at those spending hours jumping from one web page to the other; we didn't have time for that (and didn't see much value in it).
I wouldn't be surprised if there are lots of XP systems around that never connects to the internet. The tasks they do have no need for it. They are completely invisible in statistics based on web counting.
XP marked a revolution in stability and functionality. It was a good system. There are good reasons why so many stuck to it for a long, long time. (I did myself, not switching to Win7 until I got the need for a software package available only in 64 bit version.)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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XP embeded, but many ATMs are XP, so many.
I am a bit confused what the writers tone is suppoded to be. Like yeah, if its not connecting to the internet, what the harm.
Or they the type to get a new phone ever year, just because its new.
And then even if it is connected to the internet, depends what you doing. If setup for single point of communication to send out only data on a none standard port, fine, none issue its working.
Patches and updates are for what. Oh no, not updated some functionality which never touch, and so uptime of machine is at 99.999% time, which is about 5 minutes downtime in the year.
best not tell them that banks still running on mainframes from the 80s.
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maze3 wrote: I am a bit confused what the writers tone is suppoded to be.
Which writer? Me, or the Computerworld one? I either case, don't make any deep analysis of the question 
if its not connecting to the internet, what the harm It sounds almost if you are saying that anyone who thinks it protects a machine to be offline is dangerously naive. True enough: The last virus I experienced was a boot sector virus (if you don't know the term, as a security expert of at least 50 years of age). This millennium I haven't heard about any new virus or other sorts of PC malware that did not spread across the network.
maze3 wrote: Patches and updates are for what.
If an offline XP machine is doing exactly the same tasks as it did 20 years ago, with not issues detected the last 18 of those, why would it need any patches or updates? What would the threats be? (A power outage, but that cannot be prevented by software updates/patches).
It must be more that 20 years since I first heard some teenagers laughing mockingly: A PC without internet?? What would be the use of that? -- Many young people see the PC only as a lightweight frontend to the internet. They can do all the same things with a tablet, or today, on a smartphone. Their only concept of 'performance' is benchmark program of 'fps' when running network games, completely ignorant of the PC as a freestanding tool and workhorse in its own right.
I know that I am old style, but I like tools that do not change ever week. Where I know that no cloud provider is taking a sneak look in my files, to see if I have written down non-PC, 'forbidden' thoughts (I have!). Or possibly I might have stored photos that might fire off the extreme fantasies of other users, just by seeing my mention of it; that has happened before (even here at CP). So I am online only when I fetch my email or actively search the internet for information. That includes reading CP.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Agree 100%. We had very little updates, most of them actually worked the first time around without crashes or missing items, development code was an easy fix/update at the time, no rocket science was needed to operate the system.
I know of many apps still requiring XP and used on our intranet which runs happily along many other current .NET, C# etc apps that are struggling to operate without constant updates or debugging. These apps DOES NOT crash. Someone came up with a bright idea to upgrade one of these apps a while back and it caused more harm than harmony, The old replaced (yes I know) VB6 app was re-installed and an entire region was kept happy... my 5 cents...
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trønderen wrote: I wouldn't be surprised if there are lots of XP systems around that never connects to the internet.
These systems are also 100% secure for the simple reason that they don't connect to the internet.
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I'm pretty sure most security folks would say air-gapped security still isn't 100% secure.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)
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TNCaver wrote: I'm pretty sure most security folks would say air-gapped security still isn't 100% secure.
If a security guy says that anything is 100% secure, I would be very skeptical.
I have learned to live with a door lock that is not 100% pick proof. I send personal letters through the mail, knowing that somewhere along the line, some mail man or public officer might open the envelope to see the personal messages. I was considering setting up a SIP server so that I could encrypt my phone conversations with my friends (equipped with SIP clients handling encryption). I know that even AES256 can be broken, yet I use that for encryption. My ordinary, non-100%-secure measures against malware has kept my PCs virus-free for 30 years.
A security expert analyzed the network at my workplace, and gave a presentation of how attackers work. He started out with the very simple attacks, and and how to prevent them, and then went on: But what if the attacker ... After a number of increasingly advanced attacks, he opened each of the following steps with: Let's turn the panic control one step higher! The panic control went beyond 11 on a scale to 10, and his examples was becoming so absurd, although in theory possible, that we were laughing out loud, literally!
At the moment, my 8 year old PC serves me well. If some software forces me to update it to run Win11, I will most likely run the new PC completely offline, keeping this as the 'exposed' one. I will not fear 'air gapped' security attacks against the offlined one (given that for 30 years, I haven't had any infection of this PC and its predecessors).
I think that panic sometimes blocks common sense.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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