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London's Metropolitan Police Still Running 27,000 Windows XP Desktops (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: London's Met Police has missed its deadline for abandoning the out-of-date operating system Windows XP, as findings reveal 27,000 computers still run on the software two years after official support ended. Microsoft stopped issuing updates and patches for Windows XP in Spring 2014, meaning that any new bugs and flaws in the operating system are left open to attack. A particularly risky status for the UK capital's police force – itself running operations against hacking and other cybercrime activity. The figures were disclosed by Conservative politician Andrew Boff. The Greater London Assembly member said: 'The Met should have stopped using Windows XP in 2014 when extended support ended, and to hear that 27,000 computers are still using it is worrying.' As in similar cases across civil departments, the core problem is bespoke system development, and the costs and time associated with integrating a new OS with customized systems.
As someone who is on the tail end of a 700 computer migration from WinXP to Win7, I feel their pain. A single critical program that won't run on Win7 can be a showstopper. Not to mention special hardware for which no Win7 drivers are available - all of a sudden that $120 upgrade cost for a Win7 license became $25,120 when you include the cost of a new laser engraver.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
I wonder how many systems around the world are still running Windows 95? DOS? Older versions of Linux, Unix, or Apple's operating systems?
As long as firewall is on and you run a fixed set of apps from trusted sources, you are perfectly safe. So is IE if you only visit internal sites. And for external browsing, browser security is more important than OS security. There will be forked versions of recent Firefox and Chromium builds forever.
The whole upgrade hype is largely financially motivated on part of Microsoft and consulting agencies.
So you are on Windows now. That is all good and fine. However the majority of your Applications should be Web Standards Based developed in a easy OS portable language. With a database system available in multiple OS.
Because time and time again, The next generation of Computer/OS breaks a lot of compatibility and moving over to a new platform is a big headache.
Vs that web application developed in PHP back in 2003 while may not be pretty will still work on Windows 10 or the Bosses new iPad. Without having to rework the entire thing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
'The Met should have stopped using Windows XP in 2014
The Met should have begun the switch to Linux (or at least open source technologies) in 2001.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Trying to run a government or even a moderately complex business with Linux machines would be the mother of all clusterfucks.
You're obviously not familiar with the patching process for Microsoft Windows. I give my thanks to Microsoft everyday for the job security it provides me.
JUL
Linux Rocks
aaaaaaa
I believe contract-based enterprise support is still available. My retail-licensed XP vm's still get occasional security update pushes, too.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Why do police need laser engravers?
/sarcasm
It's main danger is in that runs services in the same session as the locally logged-in user (session 0). This will always remain a vector of attack. But other than that, it's just as easy to secure as Win 7.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
And remove one of the major clubs MS uses to beat its users into migrating to their latest? They'd be cutting their own throats. Also, XP would then never die, it would get reborn as "MS without MS" and represent a fork of their alleged software that they do not control.
This idea has been discussed to death... the drivers and a lot of OS code is protected with NDA from various vendors so they can't release the source code.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Pay-to-play, even if they pass the support effort on to a 3rd party contractor, would be nice for customers. But ultimately I think Microsoft wants everyone to buy new computers and new copies of their latest operating system. The planned obsolesce has always been about money, the security aspect is a convenient excuse to push that agenda.
As an example, SABRE (airline reservation system) has been running in one form or another since the 1970's. And even though ACP (IBM Airline Control Program, an operating system) was only officially supported for about 10 years ('68-'79), it continued to be used in production environments for decades after that.
But to be fair IBM was traditionally about selling big hardware and support contracts and not about selling software, a very different style of business compared to Microsoft.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There is a good portion of the W3C that is well supported by the major browsers and if if you follow those your app tends to function correctly in all of them.
I tend to stick to xhtml standard while the most picky, tends to render rather identically across all modern browsers.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Doesn't matter, when a company stops supporting a product, they should lose the copyright over it and it should become public domain.
I think patching security holes be forced on Microsoft. Any new security hole should be a matter of national/World security and if Microsoft refused to path them, then they should be forced to open the source so it can be patched. That is IMO windows is bigger them MS.
Jack of all trades,master of none
People never seem to figure out that software isn't write-once/run-forever. Over time, software rots from the outside in. Sure, the bits are all there, but the hardware and external services that they are designed to talk to eventually change so much that having the original bits is useless.
Budgeting software as a one-time expense is like buying a Mercedes and never doing an oil change.
There is a problem with Proprietary versus Open, though. I still have the source-code disks for Red Hat 7. Not the RHEL one with systemd, the original Red Hat version 7.2, circa Y2K. If my organization was tied tightly to it, having the source code means that if a problem arises relative to the OS, I could pay someone a no-doubt exorbitant amount of money to dig into that code and do something about it. You can't do that with Windows NT. Even if you had the deep pockets that allowed you source code access to NT, Microsoft probably repealed that by now. Essentially, if you need source code changes for Windows NT, the cost wouldn't be merely exorbitant, they'd probably be ruinous. And, of course, they could simply refuse to help you at all. Because as far as I am aware, Microsoft never licensed Windows unconditionally and in perpetuity to anyone, and if certainly wouldn't have been cheap if they did.
And cheap is a lot of why you end up with thousands of dead copies of XP running on critical systems daily.