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Set Your Watches For the End of Windows XP
An anonymous reader writes "In one year today exactly, Microsoft will shut down support for Windows XP. The deadline will prove a challenge for many of Australia's largest users of IT, all struggling to migrate to new Microsoft environments." Net Applications' chart of current OS market share figures shows XP only slightly behind Windows 7, even now.
XP will no longer be "supported" but it will certainly still be used by 10's of millions of computers a year from now (and two, and three, and more). It's also a certainty that a stationary "unsupported" target will get a lot of attention by exploits and black hats.
XP -> 7 is entirely worth it. I'm no IT professional and don't know the logistics of it all but when I upgraded it was like day and night. I really don't understand the slow uptake to 7. Laziness? XP to Vista I understand, Vista was a pile of poopy fart poops. But 7 is a breeze and if I may boldly say in my experience even more reliable than XP. Of course, I could be letting the odd obscure legacy program go over my head but still... 7. 7 7 7 7 7. Did I mention 7?
You can dance if you want to.
It's not going to work when it gets riddled with malware because of unpatched remote exploits.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
> It's not going to work when it gets riddled with malware because of unpatched remote exploits.
Take a look at whatever latest OS you are currently running. Is it bug and exploit free? If you think it is, then come back in a year and there likely will be a long list of vulnerabilities found during that time. And they didn't just magically appear, most of these vulnerabilities are in your OS RIGHT NOW and there is a good chance the bad guys have known about them for quite a while too.
Even a brand new Windows 7/8/Blue or Mac or Linux shouldn't just be thrown on the net without some extra precautions.
With good practices, and and extra precautions, even Windows 95 can be "secure". Many people will choose to take this path, manage security themselves, and continue to happily run Windows XP.
Now imagine that non-technical user on a different OS. Probably would get the same results....it's a user problem, not an OS problem. They are the ones that click on the African prince email links.
And how does she get updates to Flash, Java and other programs that have their own updater program that require intervention by a user with and Administrator login?
I'm sorry, but no. Running as a non-administrator only works if you have someone else who keeps the system updated.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The main issue with sandboxing in the style of Android is that it doesn't actually work. Any application that needs to be able to modify documents has the 'access SD card' permission, and that gives it access to all other documents. There is an inherent problem with this approach, in that you either give such coarse-grained permissions that they leak like a sieve, or you have such fine-grained ones that 99% of users don't understand them.
Currently, the most common way of deploying Android malware is to find a fairly popular app in the Market (sorry, Play Store), download it, add the trojan, reupload it with a different name and a price of zero, download it a few dozen times and rate it 5 stars, and then wait for users to install it. You can usually even keep the same permissions as the original, as it is pretty much the norm for applications to ask for far more permissions than they actually need.
If you did this on Windows, you'd have screensavers saying that they needed full access to C: to run, and users would just click 'yes, show me the kittens'.
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