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Microsoft's Ticking Time Bomb Is Windows XP
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Shona Ghosh writes at PC Pro that the final deadline for Windows XP support in April 2014 will act as the starting pistol for developing new exploits as hackers reverse-engineer patches issued for Windows 7 or Windows 8 to scout for XP vulnerabilities. "The very first month that Microsoft releases security updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will reverse-engineer those updates, find the vulnerabilities and test Windows XP to see if it shares [them]," says Tim Rains, the director of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group. Microsoft says that XP shared 30 security holes with Windows 7 and Windows 8 between July 2012 and July 2013. Gregg Keizer says that if a major chunk of the world's PCs remains tied to XP, as seems certain, Microsoft will face an unenviable choice: Stick to plan and put millions of customers at risk from malware infection, or backtrack from long-standing policies and proclamations." (Read on for more.)
"In either case, it will face a public relations backlash, whether from customers who complain they've been forsaken or those angry at Microsoft for pushing them to upgrade when, in the end, they didn't need to." Microsoft makes little or no revenue from customers with old PCs, and desperately wants them to buy a new Windows system of some sort. "It's very easy to say 'just upgrade,' but not all business can do so," says Lawrence Pingree, citing money, resources and mission-critical software. "One of the main reasons why people cannot leave XP is compatibility with other software." Nor is Microsoft blameless. XP has hung around because of the mistakes Microsoft made with Windows Vista, the OS flop that outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer copped to as his biggest regret. If Vista had been more like Windows 7, or had shipped at its original "Longhorn" timetable of 2004, then been followed three years later by Windows 7, XP would not have had the opportunity to lock up the ecosystem for a decade. Pingree has a suggestion for Microsoft. ""If it's such a big problem, maybe they should offer an 'Extended Life' [support] subscription and charge for it.""
Microsoft should extend support for XP...but only on a cash-for-patch basis. Sell patches at $5 a pop for XP user's, or a one Year Security Update Subscription for $20.
It's a win-win situation....
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
You can run XP in a virtual machine if you have software you must absolutely run that cannot run under Windows 7 or 8.
If your business cannot support the cost of an upgrade, you really aren't doing it right and probably aren't making much money anyway.
Windows 7 has been out for over FOUR freaking years. Quite the whiny bitching already.
I feel a Slashdot Poll might be in our future:
Number of Windows XP security updates Microsoft will release in the first and second year after they said they wouldn't:
- 0
- 1-5
- 5-10
- 11 or more
New things are always on the horizon
Although Windows XP still works wonderfully for me, and although I'd like to continue using it (with security updates of course), I really can't complain. It's one of the longest supported OS's in PC history. Nothing else has come even close, and no vendor is talking about having anywhere near a decade+ of support in the near future, either.
I don't respond to AC's.
This is absurd. Yes, Vista was a disaster, but Windows 7 was a huge upgrade from XP.
Microsoft isn't putting customers at risk by not patching what will then be a 13-year old operating system. They had a full life cycle plan in place and customers have had many years advance notice to plan their transition. The lack of resources placed on transitioning legacy software to something other than an end-of-life OS is squarely the fault of the customers. The people in charge obviously don't place a great deal of importance on security or support. They have made their decision, let them suffer the consequences.
Red Hat offers 10 years of support. And new versions of Red Hat are generally better than previous versions, so there isn't as much need to hold on to old versions.
Source: http://www.serverwatch.com/server-news/red-hat-extends-linux-support.html
If your statement is correct...
This is absurd. Yes, Vista was a disaster, but Windows 7 was a huge upgrade from XP.
then why won't all XP software run on Windows 7, and why hasn't everyone seen the error of their ways, and upgraded their XP systems?
My dad owns a number of companies which all went out and bought extra XP systems and stuck them in a closet for future deployment because of the software compatibility issues between XP and Windows 7 and later. Specifically, they don't want to have to re-buy all their machines, and re-buy all their existing software, and rewrite from scratch all their Microsoft COM component based glue code the next time they hire a new person into the office.
Microsoft is out of its teeny little mind if it believes small cash flow based businesses have the available capital to enable them to do this; the incompatibility is killing adoption of anything later than Windows XP for almost every business I know that has 100 or less employees, which is 95% of all businesses in the U.S..
You're under the false assumption that everybody buys new hardware every year or two. I have hardware that's been running for over a decade, and is still working just fine.
I don't respond to AC's.
The key to this dilemma comes down to one word:
"Microsoft will face an unenviable choice: Stick to plan and put millions of customers at risk from malware infection,"
I don't think that Microsoft actually considers these people "customers." I think MS very distinctly considers them non-customers of their flagship product, since they have not purchased any of the four latest versions (Vista, 7, 8, 8.1). All of Microsoft's customers should have followed its exhortations over the last five years to spend a few bucks and upgrade dump their now-13-year-old OS.
It's indisputable that across the computing industry, the perceived mandate of legacy support for next-gen OSes is increasingly feeble. In non-desktop markets - e.g., consoles and phones - the presumption was never there to begin with (starting with the Super Nintendo!) Web programming exhibits similar tendencies - how many Java applications from back in the day won't run on modern browsers? And won't that include the entire Silverlight platform in a few years? The tendency is that the river of upgrades will carry all projects of significance along in its current, and the projects that gather on the banks (i.e., don't receive newest-OS upgrades) are... detritus. For right or wrong, that's the view.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Yes, Vista was a public relations disaster
Fixed that for you. I ran Vista for years.
99.9999% of the bullshit surrounding Vista was just that. Pure, fucking, unadulterated bullshit, spewed by the same mewling retards who still don't understand why their shitty operating system from well over a decade ago needs to die.
XP is over. Fucking deal with it.
More of linux shop here but the one remaining ms os pc which had updates until november has just been deemed illegal by somebody last month.
I briefly tried to deal with the issue - the supplier hp told me to get lost, and once through to the right region (hp's website royally sucks) the human blamed ms and gave me a wrong phone number for buck passing.
I have put the machine on a list for debian upgrades for next year.
The problem is that you can't upgrade to Windows 7 anymore. Also, you can't buy a new computer with Windows 7. You have to go to Windows 8. Which it's crap, compared to Windows 7. Whoever upgraded to Windows 7 is holding on to it and isn't going to move to Windows 8 until... never.
Sometime in Jan or Feb 2014, MS should send a patch to XP with a nag popup. The popup will state "XP End of Life April 8, 2014. Please upgrade or you will loose internet connectivity". The number of times this popup appears increases the closer you get to Apr 8. Come April 8, all ports on XP are closed permanently. This illustrates why Open Source OSs are preferable to closed OSs. With Linux/*BSD... one can, if desired and have the knowledge, patch it themselves if they need to run a very old release of a system.
You're right. Better to save that $6.5 million and invest it for the inevitable $50 million malware cleanup.
I have hardware in a cupboard that failed after a year or two or in some cases even earlier but I never bothered to jump through the hoops to get it fixed or replaced under warranty. I also have working computing gear that dates back to the 70s. That fact that some hardware has survived a decade doesn't mean that all (or even most) hardware will do so.
Businesses usually replace a desktop box every four or five years, laptops maybe every two or three. Any five-year-old desktop running XP or similar will have ageing components, hard drives wearing out mechanically, fans dying etc. which makes them ripe for replacement. They also probably don't support affordable amounts of RAM (typically 8 or 16GB) which can make a serious difference to performance in 64-bit operating systems -- nearly all XP installs were for the 32-bit version which limits out hard at 3.5GB. XP also has the 2TB drive volume limit and no TRIM for SSDs. Older boxes have no hardware support for SATA-3 and usually poor support for SATA generally. They may still be AGP rather than supporting any version of PCI-e, no USB 3.0 ports, the onboard video is crude and slow etc. etc.
And don't even get me started with the piece of shit that is windows 8, linux users are not forced to use a half-tablet OS
Gnome 3 and Unity would like a word with you.
$6.5 million? Even if you had to pay the retail price for all of those (which you don't) that would mean that you have nearly 22,000 workstations that are connected to the internet. What the hell does your company do that it has that many computers operating but doesn't have the easy ability to invest $6.5 million???
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
And don't even get me started with the piece of shit that is windows 8, linux users are not forced to use a half-tablet OS
Gnome 3 and Unity would like a word with you.
KDE, Afterstep, Enlightenment, Windows Maker and XFCE would like a word with you.
No such options on Windows Tablet 8/8.1 I'm afraid.
to upgrade!
To Linux, I hope?
XP supports legacy 16 and 8 bit stuff
What 8-bit stuff are you talking about? The only 8-bit software that runs on Windows XP runs in an emulator such as FCEUX. The 16-bit software runs in a virtual machine anyway, called NTVDM (for MS-DOS software) or WOWExec (for Windows 3.x software).
When I became fed up with Un(usabil)ity in the Ubuntu 11.04 days, I did sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop and never looked back. So what AC wrote is true: the owner of a PC running GNU/Linux isn't forced into a particular GUI in the same way that iPad and PlayStation owners are forced into the selection that those platforms offer.
Yes, you can upgrade for free, or damn near free. Simply upgrade to Linux or a BSD. Seriously. I here all sorts of nonsense about how hard it is to switch to Linux, and to Gnu. Screw all of that. Have you noticed that our economy sucks? A common refrain heard by the working class, is that we are now competing with labor markets from around the world. We have to adapt, or go out of business. Do more with less, retrain to do new tasks, yada yada yada.
My answer goes right along with all that other nonsense. If you can't be retrained to run Linux, then you're out of the workforce. And, no, I don't really give a damn that you might lose your home as a result. No one gave a small damn when coal miners were foreclosed on. Or auto workers. Or construction workers.
The "ticking time bomb" isn't Windows XP. The time bomb is America's inability to adapt to a changing reality. Windows is so 1990's. This is the 2010's now.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"AuthenticAMD"
I'm struck by an image of the AMD logo materializing a hand just to give the finger to GenuineIntel.
Perhaps stockpiling machines compatible with existing paid-for peripherals and paid-for proprietary software is cheaper than re-buying multi-thousand-dollar peripherals and multi-thousand-dollar proprietary software.
For home or personal use, ok. Though I would never deploy any 3rd party mods to the core GUI in a corporate setting. It's just one patch away from getting the ban hammer by Microsoft. That, or an unintentional compatibility rift is now formed. Either way, it's not something you want as an IT manager to be responsible for. Then again, I wouldn't be deploying Windows 8 in the first place.
Life is not for the lazy.
Well, at the very least you could make a WinXP virtual machine, then you can easily restore it when it screws up. You could also make WinXP into a BartPE CDROM and run it in an uncorruptable form.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"Except ability to run about 20 years' worth of software and on far older and newer hardware, since it has had such a long service life and represented the pinnacle of backward compatibility before MS decided DOS-based software (Win98) has surely all been retired."
PLEASE! Just give up on all that 20 year old software! All that backward compatibility, and legacy support, is exactly what crippled XP more than anything else! Without all that legacy support, XP would have started out more secure than it did. JUST GIVE IT UP!! I don't want or need 20 year old software running on my system. If you really, truly believe that you need software that old, then rebuild it!!
It's not like software development is a forgotten art from 5000 years ago. Hire someone, or hire a team, to rebuild the functionality that you need. Or, do it yourself.
Stop expecting the world to operate in some twisted time warp that suits your own particular needs.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It's not 12 years old. 12 years (or is it 13?) is when the first version of XP was released, but XP continued to be sold for nearly the entire decade. And unlike GNU/Linux, where you can just download a newer version of the effected component and expect virtually everything to work, upgrading to Vista/7/8/8.1 requires paying money and upgrading the entire system at the same time, pretty much expecting breakages, and new hardware requirements.
Which is not to suggest Microsoft should be supporting it. With proprietary operating systems, I kinda feel there needs to be a greater understanding of the consequences of handing your testicles to a company that has to make a profit to survive.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I know of NO businesses that are just hankering with bated breath to use Windows 8. They would rather upgrade to 7. Home users are having it shoved down their throats with every new PC they buy and they hate it too. You can argue about all the new wonderful things it has under the hood, but the interface is shit. Don't say "It's fine once you get used to it," because it's a step backward in usability. Even after installing something like Classic Shell or Start8 the 'Modern' apps still run fullscreen. "But you can learn your way around that!" you cry. That's some helluvan arrogant attitude to have. The only reason M$ dumped the old menu/window-based interface is because they it would benefit THEM in some imagined convergence of the desktop and tablet, **not** to benefit users or create something more efficient. They were wrong.
People who are still using XP day-to-day are idiots and Microsoft shouldn't encourage them.
Really? People are idiots for not spending money on new equipment that adds precisely zero additional feature that they need? We should be forced to upgrade to Microsoft's latest software because not upgrading doesn't add to Microsoft's profits? My company uses XP on the majority of our computers and there is nothing whatsoever in Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8 that is necessary for us. So we're idiots for not spending money needlessly? Thank $diety we don't let you make our purchasing decisions.
There is almost no scenario where continuing to use XP as your main desktop makes sense
Except for the millions of people whose actual computing needs are perfectly adequately filled by XP.
So it's somehow Linux' fault that your IT department wasn't competent enough to at least do some research and testing with the users first?
You do realize that a complete OS and app suite change is not as easy as just downloading a distro and installing it everywhere, right?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The 8088 in the IBM PC-XT was 16 bit, but it was limited to an 8-bit external IO path. That made it easier for it to use the existing 8 bit expansion chips (8255, 8253, 8251, etc.)
It's the same as the 80386sx, which was a full 32 bit processor interally but had limited 16-bit external IO to reduce cost.
If IBM had used an 8086 processor, they would have either had to use an expensive 16-bit EPROM or twice as many 8-bit EPROMs for the BIOS, as one example of why the choice was made. Back at product introduction (the plain PC, not the PC-XT) the PC sold with as little as 16K of DRAM on the motherboard, with sockets to upgrade to the full 64K.
If Vista had been more like Windows 7
This is such bullshit! In the alternative universe where Windows 7 was ready on the day Vista came out, software drivers for W7 would have been as unavailable as they were for Vista. All sorts of software that required users to have full admin permissions would have been broken by W7 UAC as it was by Vista's UAC. All PCs sold with 512MB or 1GB RAM would have still be slow compared to XP.
Only 1 or 2 years down the line when OEMs had caught up and released proper drivers, when PCs were being sold with 2GB+ RAM and when people learned to separate normal from admin users did Windows Vista/7/8 become less of a nuisance. It had very little to do with Windows 7 being so awesome.
Really? I've been using Linux on my desktop for years with no complaints. So has my barely computer literate father (and incidentally I get far fewer tech support calls now). No, it's not "just like Windows", but if you really love everything about Windows then you should stick with that, obviously you're not Linux's target audience. Of course if what you really mean is that it's not supported by 100% of the software you need/want to use, and you can't find suitable alternatives... well that's not really anything to do with Linux's readiness is it? Ask the people making your software when they are going to release a Linux version, because that's the only way that *they* will know that anyone in their customer base cares.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I've got a couple 70-something members in my family who are running XP laptops just to run a web browser: email and the basics. Having moved to Linux myself and being the family computer guy, I'm wanting to switch these two laptops to some lightweight flavor of Linux that will work for them and require little or no support from me. I've tried many different lightweight distros in the past year, but I thought I'd ask here for input from any of you who have actually done what I'm about to do.
Requirements:
- fast and light: will run fine on a Thinkpad T41 (which doesn't support PAE kernel)
- Windows-like interface (I'm thinking LXDE, definitely not Unity)
- easy to use Wi-Fi manager (some of the Wi-Fi managers in lightweight Linux distros are way too technical for a novice)
- once a year if any on-site maintenance (remote maintenance is fine if necessary)
- auto updates in background but with very low chance of system breaking with an update (maybe no auto updates is better?)
- ACPI support (at least lid closed = suspend)
- printer support
Chromium OS seems like a good option, and it will run on one laptop (Thinkpad T61) but I'm pretty sure it uses a PAE kernel, ruling out the T41. I've been looking at Lubuntu, Peppermint OS, Porteus, Slax, Puppy Linux. All seem like viable options with a 30-minute test drive, but this is where I'm seeking feedback: on how some of these distros might be good or bad choices in the long-term, especially given that I won't be able to be physically present if something goes wrong.
www.gaiageek.com
I see what you did there. "I don't understand the hate" has risen to meme status. I don't waste time hating vista, anymore than I would waste time hating broccoli. Vista and win8 share the traits that they were unusable on first release, vista eventually became tolerable but wasn't truly fixed until win7, and win8 is following a similar path. We have some machines still running xp, but the driving force to upgrade is not some artificial Microsoft deadline, but when there will be something reasonable to upgrade to.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Oh look guys, it's Target's CTO posting to Slashdot! Good to see you man, but I'm surprised you found time to hang out with us.
No, people are idiots for believing that security isn't a feature that is needed.
No one is arguing that security isn't necessary. HOWEVER, security updates are a correction of a defect in the product. They are necessary in the same sense that insurance is necessary. Security updates could be provided for XP by Microsoft for a (reasonable) fee but that is not an option Microsoft has put on the table. There is no technological reason why I need to "upgrade" to Windows 8.
People are also idiots for believing that a for profit company (like Microsoft) is obligated to provide free updates to a product forever.
Microsoft can do whatever they want. However what they are accomplishing isn't to make me want to upgrade to their latest products. If anything it makes me want to use their systems less. I can get linux security updates for free so Microsoft needs to add more value if they want my continued business. They don't have to make security updates free but that isn't what they chose to do. They want me to buy an entirely new product with new and different defects, additional hardware, software migration and training costs. This instead of merely offering to continue security updates for a nominal fee for the system I already have which I already know works. I'm guessing you've never run a business because only an idiot spends money to change something that is working just fine when the change is not actually necessary.
You appear to be saying that there is nothing in post-XP versions of Windows that is necessary for your company.
That is correct. There is no new feature in any more recent version of Windows that will add to the bottom line of my company. Other companies situations may be different but I do know for a fact that thousands of companies and individuals are in the same situation as I am.
Do you really believe that security of your systems is not necessary?
Wrong question. Of course security is necessary but security updates are nothing more than corrections of a product defect. Security is nothing more than a cost to me. It is like insurance - necessary but it does not ever add a penny to the bottom line. I have zero interest in throwing out a working production system just because it does not add to Microsoft's bottom line.
Do you really believe that Microsoft should spend the money (in either direct or opportunity costs) to provide those updates to you for free forever?
I never said anything about how they should provide updates or whether they should charge for them. Frankly if Microsoft were to charge a modest fee (and I do mean modest) to continue security updates for XP, I'd consider paying it. I have very good reasons why our company still uses XP based machines, not the least of which is that we have some critical software that CANNOT be ported. (not my fault - some idiot before me bought it) While I will fix that in due time, it isn't going to happen in the next 6 months and the expense is considerably larger than a new PC with Windows 8 on it.