China Has a Massive Windows XP Problem

An anonymous reader writes "The Chinese are going to have a very, very hard time kicking the Windows XP habit. The deadline for the retirement of Microsoft's most successful operating system ever is eight months from tomorrow: April 8, 2014. That's the day when the Redmond, Wash. company is to deliver the last XP security update. According to analytics company Net Applications, 37.2% of the globe's personal computers ran Windows XP last month. If Microsoft's estimate of 1.4 billion Windows PCs worldwide is accurate, XP's share translates into nearly 570 million machines. In the U.S., 16.4% of all personal computers ran Windows XP in July, or about one in six, Net Applications' data showed. But in China, 72.1% of the country's computers relied on the soon-to-retire operating system last month, or nearly three out of every four systems."

Comments

Re:xp still works

[Billly Gates]

You mean the all so horrible instant search where I can start word and view files by subject in 1\9 of a second without a mouse?

You couldn't pay me to go back to XP style start menu! Yuck.

Some people are so stuburn and hate change so much they refuse to learn anything new including Windows 7 features as I am not referingto 8 at all.

We need to understand what "retire" means

[roc97007]

I'll let you in on a little secret -- a lot of embedded control systems are still running Windows 98. Test by: Stick around when a bottle return machine is rebooted.

In other words. What is China going to do when XP is "retired"? You're kidding, right?

Taxes

[ebonum]

China's whole tax system works on a printed documents called a fapiao (fa-piao).
Every company in China has at least one dedicated machine with a special dot matrix printer to print fapiaos.
The software to print fapiaos only runs on Windows XP.

It can not be understated how critical fapiaos are to China's tax system. Big companies use them to pay the 17% VAT (some services and logistics companies pay less than 17%). If you lose the fapiao you get from your supplier, you might as we have lost actual cash. You must have it to offset the VAT you owe. During your annual tax review, you must have fapiaos to keep your taxes low. These are so important, there is a booming business in faking fapiaos. This is mostly done through fake transactions. Faking the actual fapiao is not so easy these days. Each fapiao carries a unique number and can the traced.

If you go out to eat, you can demand a fapiao. For westerners, this can be submitted to reduce your taxes. The top tax rate is 45%, so fapiaos are very valuable. For local Chinese, they submit them as a business/company expense. For people working in restaurants, this is a source of extra cash. If a customer doesn't ask for a fapiao, the employees can print one anyway. On the black market, these can be sold for 5-10 cents on the dollar. The same applies to cab drivers. Many passengers don't take their receipt. The receipt is a valid fapiao that can be used to reduce taxes. The cab drivers will sell them for extra cash. Just ask. :)

Re:xp still works

[Billly Gates]

Windows 95 used to do that and I forgot about that.

When I am on a Windows 7 if I am thinking of something I wrote 3 years ago I just hit th windows key and type acme sales 2010 and enter to find the documents. Beagle under Linux tried similiar functionalty.

I show all die hard XP users this and within 10 minutes they are hooked. I do not care about the menus as I am so hooked on instant search now that I cant live without it. Jumplists and aero snap make me a windows 7 diehard.

Sorry I lost faith in Linux after gnome 3. Windoes 8 might make me reconsider though :-)

Windows 7 for a crappy Windows OS really was the best version and to me even eclipsed XP.

Re:xp still works

[TheRaven64]

Linux malware is hard to write, although the SCTP vulnerability last year would have allowed a worm that ran in kernelspace and didn't depend on any installed software. Ubuntu malware, or Android malware, however, are quite easy. That 0.1% figure for Android malware in comparison to Windows malware is probably just about true if you're counting all malware written for both platforms since they were introduced, irrespective of whether it works on recent versions, but it's nowhere near close if you're counting new malware. Take a look at this list and tell me that a widely deployed Linux distribution is hard to write malware for. For example, the CURL CVE-2013-2174 allows a remote attacker with a crafted URL to run arbitrary code, and CVE-2013-1697 in Mozilla allows HTML emails displayed with Thunderbird or web pages displayed with FireFox to execute JavaScript with a privilege level that allows it to make calls to native libraries, effectively meaning arbitrary code execution with ambient privilege. CVE-2013-1052 would allow either of these attacks to upgrade privilege and then install a rootkit.