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Windows XP Support Deal Not Renewed By UK Government, Leaves PCs Open To Attack
girlmad writes: The government's one-year £5.5m Windows XP support deal with Microsoft has not been extended, sources have told V3, despite thousands of computers across Whitehall still running the ancient software, leaving them wide open to cyber attacks. It's still unclear when all government machines will be migrated to a newer OS.
No need. What the summary doesn't cover (it's in the the actual article) is that that this was always the plan. The UK Cabinet Office arranged a blanket agreement for the extended support coverage that applied to all departments that needed it for a lower overall cost, making it quite clear right from the start that this contract would not be renewed, and it hasn't been. It's now up to the individual departments to decide whether or not they wish to expend some of their own budget on further extending their specific support with Microsoft on a per-department basis. If there's a story here, it's the number of PCs still running XP that are now outside support and which departments those PCs are in, but that's something the article doesn't cover.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Pretty much this. Most likely someone with a clue finally realised that as long as you have a working firewall and anti-virus that will block outside executables, your XP machine is quite safe from "omg internet viruses". Especially if like most computers in major organisation, it's also sitting behind a NAT.