London Metropolitan Police's 18,000 Windows XP PCs Is a Disaster Waiting To Happen (mspoweruser.com)

According to MSPoweruser, the London Metropolitan Police are still using around 18,000 PCs powered by Windows XP, an operating system Microsoft stopped supporting in 2014. What's more is that the police force is upgrading its PCs from Windows XP to Windows 8.1, instead of Windows 10. Only 8 PCs at the police force are reportedly powered by the "most secure version of Windows right now." From the report: From the looks of things, the London Metropolitan Police will continue to upgrade their systems to Windows 8.1 at the moment. Windows 8.1 is still being supported by Microsoft, although the mainstream support for the OS is set to end on the 9 January 2018. Microsoft will offer extended support for the OS until 2023, which means Windows 8.1 is still a much more secure alternative for the Metropolitan Police than Windows XP. Windows 10 still would have been the best option in terms of security, however. Microsoft is releasing security updates for the OS every month, and the new advanced security features like Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection makes PCs running Windows a whole lot more secure. The spokesman of the 0Conservative London Assembly said in a statement: "The Met is working towards upgrading its software, but in its current state it's like a fish swimming in a pool of sharks. It is vital the Met is given the resources to step up its upgrade timeline before we see another cyber-attack with nationwide security implications."

Comments

Looking for trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until Mexico attacks them like they just did to Ukraine.

It's hard

[Anonymous Coward]

When you are bogged down dealing with all those trucks of peace.

I love this crap

[Snotnose]

Private companies upgrade regularly, realizing it improves security/productivity. Government agencies never upgrade, then bitch that their anti-terrorism agencies are using 10 year old HW/SW cuz they can't afford to upgrade.

It's called managing your resources. Or maybe "scare the government into giving us more money than we need cuz look how outdated we are". Either way, the folks in charge need to be fired and the entire culture changed.

/ I used to get a new desktop every 3 years, whether I needed one or not
// Got memory upgrades in between desktop upgrades
/// Not so much nowdays, we seem to have hit "good enough": I'm not complaining, my work PC is plenty fast for what I do.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Stretch is out. Totem is a little buggy now but otherwise good.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Private companies used to upgrade regularly. But there's not much reason when your old laptop runs the same software just as fast as a new laptop.

Arguably most people in organizations don't need laptops or PCs at all. If your only interaction is with a word processor and spreadsheet, and email, then you definitely don't need it and could get by with a tablet.

I had an iPad 2 for six years, which regularly received updates until iOS 10. For a few hundred bucks it worked for six years with security patches and I could run most apps with no problems. That is a better model for secretaries and executives, not expensive laptops with outdated operating systems.

Re:I love this crap

[beelsebob]

Private companies upgrade regularly, realizing it improves security/productivity. Government agencies never upgrade, then bitch that their anti-terrorism agencies are using 10 year old HW/SW cuz they can't afford to upgrade.

The problem is that while the government fully recognises that upgrading is worthwhile, convincing tax payers that spending millions on upgrading computers is a valid thing to do is nigh on impossible.

You and I can see that in the long run it'll cost less, but some conservative will always tell you that short term tax cuts are worth more than long term stability.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Just no. The devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. The company I work for is stuck with MSIE 6 for SharePoint and because we need to support our customers that still use MSIE 6. We have locations in several Microsoft buildings, and they're still using 6. If Microsoft itself isn't even upgrading, why is it fair to require their customers to upgrade?

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

We have locations in several Microsoft buildings, and they're still using 6.

Same here. I work for a chain of restaurants that have four locations in Microsoft buildings. We still have to support IE 6 since so many of our customers still use it. I'm in charge of our online shopping cart, and it usually takes me longer to get it to work under IE 6 than to work in the first place with a standard web browser. I wish our Microsoft customers could upgrade, but obviously Microsoft can't make that happen.

Re:I love this crap

[dbIII]

called managing your resources. Or maybe "scare the government into giving us more money than we need cuz look how outdated we are". Either way, the folks in charge need to be fired and the entire culture changed.

Fired? The person who wouldn't give them a budget to upgrade is Prime Minister now.
It was a deliberate "austerity" policy.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would they care about long term stability? A PM will last 1-2 terms tops, so their sole motivation is to be elected in the next cycle. They will always choose a saving now over a saving in 10 years time. That's why they do silly stuff like sell natural monopolies and fail to cover asset maintenance costs.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me something. Why can't I have an OS that is static aside from bug fixes? I don't care about your new frameworks and driver models. Just keep shit the same. It works. I like how it works. I don't want to change how it works. Not just for 2 years or 5 years with consideration. 20 years. 50 years.

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many teams here are limited to 6. That sucks since most external sites don't work with that.

Re:I love this crap

[ctilsie242]

I am surprised the government doesn't rotate out the PCs every 3-5 years. XP machines have no warranty, so spending money to find parts to fix stuff is likely more expensive than a replacement cycle, there are likely auditing issues (not sure what items they are under, but having backlevel machines and operating systems surely runs afoul of some regulation.)

Of all the things that need to be updated/upgraded, it would be PCs. For example, AppLocker as a policy, disallowing admin access unless needed, enabling BitLocker, and using Secure UEFI booting may not be glamorous... but those mechanisms would have stopped this latest ransomware attack cold. Even if Secure UEFI were enabled, it would have kept the ransomware from executing phase 2 where it did the worst damage.

Re:I love this crap

[cruff]

Private companies upgrade regularly, realizing it improves security/productivity.

If only that were true. Where I'm working at the moment, we are still using Office 2007. Other tools for software development are nowhere near current. Instead, the IT department has rolled out some kind of USB connected display device for which the device drivers regularly break so that no one can actually display anything on the meeting room TVs. That solution undoubtedly cost more that a couple of types of video cable per room.

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

This. That is why Microsoft sticks to 6 for most things. I know we can't connect to many internal sites with 7 or 10.

Re:I love this crap

[Goetterdaemmerung]

Private companies upgrade regularly, realizing it improves security/productivity. Government agencies never upgrade, then bitch that their anti-terrorism agencies are using 10 year old HW/SW cuz they can't afford to upgrade.

It's called managing your resources. Or maybe "scare the government into giving us more money than we need cuz look how outdated we are". Either way, the folks in charge need to be fired and the entire culture changed.

What are you talking about? I work for a private company and we still image Windows XP or 2000 machines when the hard drives die. In fact I just upgraded an XP SP2 computer to SP3 the other day. I needed to use a floppy disk just 6 months ago. My corporate laptop is Windows 7, at least, however the lack of a CD drive is a frequent frustration.

It's no use complaining about it or insulting the entities using old software. It's expected. It will not change. The only option is external mitigation of attack vectors.

Re:I love this crap

[UnknownSoldier]

> Private companies upgrade regularly, realizing it improves security/productivity.

BWAUAHA. That's funny.

Who's going to pay for it?

Small business don't "fix" what isn't broken.

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Why shouldn't they be when MS hasn't upgraded SharePoint?

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

IE 6 is still the most important browser to companies that is Microsoft products.

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Why shouldn't MS require the use of the browser they're most proud of?

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Even MSFT requires the use of 6 for most of their internal sites.

Re: I love this crap

[See Attached]

How is it then that they pretend to be Out In Front of technology.. and laying out our collective future? Time for a change of Tech Leadership. No.. Wait.. its already happened, but the press hasn't figured it out!

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

We haven't even upgraded internally so I don't understand why others think they need to upgrade from IE 6.

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Even here at Microsoft we require 6.

Re: I love this crap

[guruevi]

How about using free software to begin with, the manpower argument is nil because you're spending more on keeping this old crap running.

Re: I love this crap

[magarity]

The worst thing is not that some customers still have old systems that want to buy from you. The worst is unreplaceable internal mission critical software that require IE6. Find the project managers who had that idea and shoot them.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Small business don't "fix" what isn't broken.

And big ones frequently don't fix what is.
When the productivity of office workers is difficult to measure, funds spent here are not easy to argue for in a big company.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish idiotic people would stop equating upgrading with security. Windows 10 is the LEAST secure OS ever because it comes prepackaged with spyware, malware and back doors galore.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with running Windows 8 or XP, so long as your administrator is competent. Any OS, aside from Windows 10, can be hardened. Those dinky Microsoft Tuesday patches don't secure shit compared to having a real admin around who understands firewalls, user permissions, network permissions, antivirus/antimalware and plain common sense.

Re:I love this crap

[brantondaveperson]

That isn't an unreasonable question, but the answer is that this isn't possible in any meaningfully secure way. You can have your XP continue to run, provided that the hardware is still available, or that a virtual machine can be built to support it, but your other two requirements are contradictory.

Bug fixes + keep shit the same. If bug fixes are understood to include security patches, and security patches include things like fixing weak encryption algorithms, or immense security disasters like ActiveX or (even worse) third-party immense security disasters like Flash, then you can't really "keep shit the same". Fundamentally, security is not a bug fix, it's an underlying design process that can't be tacked on at the end.

Re: I love this crap

[cyber-vandal]

While that may be satisfying it doesn't solve the problem.

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Why use an iPad as a replacement for a PC? Why not use a plastic dish?

The dish can be thinner and more durable while weighing less. It is dishwasher and microwave safe, immune to electronics bans on TSA screened flights and no one can hack it over the internet.

Sure, it doesn't let you type quickly or accurately, but neither does the iPad. It also comes in more colors and has many millions of accessories available, including trays, copies, placemats and even salad forks.

All in all, a PC is great, but if you can't afford one and don't need to actually create content or reports, a dish is a better value than an iPad.

Re:I love this crap

[ilguido]

Private companies upgrade regularly, realizing it improves security/productivity.

You are not aware of the number of Windows Xp/Windows CE 5.0 systems sold to this day. Industrial machinery, HVAC control systems, medical equipment etc. are all using outdated, insecure operating systems.

Re:I love this crap

[Bert64]

Upgrading encryption algorithms is easy to do without breaking any software. You upgrade the SSL libraries, and the applications use them so long as the application software doesn't do anything stupid like request specific algorithms. Plenty of old unix based software designed in the openssl 0.x days will happily build against the latest openssl and use modern algorithms if the remote peer supports them.

But that's because ssl is generally well designed with extensibility for adding new algorithms designed in from the start. activex was always poorly designed, and anyone with an understanding of security would have refused to use it in the first place.

Re:I love this crap

[Bert64]

Disallowing admin access doesn't really help in a networked environment (and chances are at such organisations, users never had admin access to begin with).. In order to exploit the smb vulnerabilities you only need the ability to connect to port 445 on a target host. The initial infection may have run as an unprivileged user on 1 workstation, but if other hosts are unpatched it would easily be able to gain privileged access to those.
Bitlocker only helps when machines are turned off, a machine thats booted and running has the drive accessible to the host os. If you compromise the running system, you can get to the files. In fact encryption does nothing to stop ransomware, there's no reason ransomware can't take already encrypted data and encrypt it again, achieving the same result from a victim perspective.

If you replace the machines every 3-5 years you have not only the cost of the new hardware and the new software that goes with it, but a whole bunch of other costs like retraining, troubleshooting, compatibility testing, reduced productivity during the transition, replacing of application software that fails on the new systems, replacement of any incompatible peripherals etc. It can be hugely expensive, and costs often spiral out of control as many problems aren't anticipated in advance. Also if you don't replace everything at once you are likely to get compatibility problems between users on the old and new systems.

Gradually as things move towards being web based these problems will clear up, the client supports a given set of standards so is easily replaceable, the servers for each application interact with each other using standard protocols and can be managed separately so theres less inter dependency and thus less breakage.

Re:I love this crap

[Bert64]

Unfortunately that's just not true, while you can take steps to mitigate the risks by running old software you will end up running software which has known vulnerabilities that you can't fix. You'll end up having to disable so many features because they have unfixable flaws, that you might as well turn the systems off.
A competent administrator is better off running an ancient linux distro, not only can you harden it to a greater degree due to being more modular, but you can also patch the software yourself as required. I have several ancient unix systems where various things have been custom upgraded or patched.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

The best part about government agencies is they have the discretion to hold off on important stuff like software upgrades, instead of making cuts elsewhere (where it might actually make sense) so they can say "we need more money!!!" and get a bigger budget and more power.

Re:I love this crap

[Antique Geekmeister]

I'm afraid that the idea that private companies upgrade regularly or reliably is not well founded in corporate experience.

I'm up right now tuning and helping run disk backups to virtualize obsolete software on obsolete hardware because many private companies _do not_ upgrade. Getting proper backups of them before replacing or upgrading them can be quite tricky when the backup software is the policy mandated corporate licensed software, and it's old, buggy, and the upgrade version does not run on the out of date operating system.

Re:I love this crap

[Antique Geekmeister]

> You upgrade the SSL libraries,

This is not always this easy. Even 3 year old versions of OpenSSL have eal compatibility issues with the most recent releases, and the most basic software compiled with the old dependency can be broken by breaking change in the library. Even such robust software as OpenSSH, curl, wget, and apt have had issues with encryption library updates.

Re:I love this crap

[thsths]

You can mitigate risk, but it requires encapsulation of questionable software. Encapsulation in terms of local system access, but also encapsulation in terms of network access. Essentially, you need either a sandbox, or a virtual machine connected to a separate (heavily filtered) network.

However, the support for either is very weak in Windows XP, which makes it a poor choice as your main OS. And that is what we are talking about here. (Once you virtualise it, the risk becomes much easier to manage.)

Re: I love this crap

[Zero__Kelvin]

Why the emphasis on being so modern? Clearly it was a foolish move to spend all that money on moving to PCs! Everybody should be using C-64s. Gates knew that 64k was enough for everybody! LOAD "*", 8, 1 FTW!

Re: I love this crap

[LordVader717]

It sounds like a great idea.

The problem is that the distinction between "bug fix" and "new stuff" is not very meaningful technically, but is rather a construct used for support schedules.

It's a strategy meant to mitigate software regression, but even a "supported" system will have countless unpatched bugs, not to mention all the third party software you might rely on.

Furthermore, while you might want "I like how it works" windows XP to stay the same for 50 years, the next person wants an eternal Windows 7, there will be windows 95 customers, and others will want MSDOS. You can't support everybody's niche configuration, it's simply too expensive.

Re: I love this crap

[Zero__Kelvin]

There is a website for you, where you belong and can post without broadcasting to everyone that you are an ignorant idiot ... but this isn't it.

Re: I love this crap

[Zero__Kelvin]

You can't get there from here ... if your administrator is competent he knows why XP can never be reasonably secured in 2017.

Re: I love this crap

[Zero__Kelvin]

The difference is that they are not connected to the internet without a solid firewall, and don't have users logging in and using them for FB and pron.

Re:I love this crap

[Bongo]

The public doesn't know how to think about IT -- the rapid change and the extensive spread into our lives and into critical infrastructure.

On the one hand there is an eagerness to adopt and "put everything onto the computer" -- on the other there's no sense of time and pace and scale and change.

And I guess for a lot of medium sized organisations (whatever that means) the IT "works" and continues to "work" and so doesn't need replacing until it "doesn't work" -- but to actually replace it you have to "start" a few years before it "doesn't work". By the time you have a system that's leaked all its confidential data to random hackers and is no longer able to perform its core functions anyway, too late, you should have started replacing it a year ago.

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

This mess is neither clever nor funny.

Re:I love this crap

[rtb61]

Are you seriously talking about software warranties of being any import what so ever, you must be kidding, what planet do you live one, certainly not this one with totally craptastic warranties, hey the software can cause billions in damages and kill thousands of people and the warranty will cover the cost of the software, right in the warranty in all piece of shit windows software it states that it is unfit for purpose.

What should happen is governments with their software budgets should directly locally fund the development of open source software and then make it available to the public.

The insanity of governments renting windows 10 from M$ with permanent lock in and bricking entire system if the extortion is not continued to be paid, why, just greed and corruption at the top.

Re:I love this crap

[brantondaveperson]

ctivex was always poorly designed, and anyone with an understanding of security would have refused to use it in the first place.

Exactly. And these sorts of design decisions are still being made, because humans aren't good enough at software yet. Fully extensible interfaces are likely impossible, and flaws such as leaving passwords around in memory can involve an entire software stack.

Re: I love this crap

[goose-incarnated]

How about using free software to begin with, the manpower argument is nil because you're spending more on keeping this old crap running.

Came here looking for this comment. Was not disappointed.

You know, all through the years a bunch of us pointed out that anything your office worker is doing on Windows can be done on a Linux desktop. We had little effect on those whining "But, but, but ... training!!!!"

Well, the jump from Win7, to Win8, to Win10 is a lot greater than the jump from WinXP to KDE and guess what - your users managed to do just fine.

So now, to mitigate the security nightmare of literally unsupportable software you want to change to ... temporarily supportable software? You know that this game will play itself out, again, in a few years, right?

At some point in the future you'll be sitting with security nightmare boxes all running Win10, and moaning about how you need more money to move off an unsupportable Win10 to the new temporarily supportable WinSwissCheese.

Move to Linux. "Unsupportable" software becomes "support it ourselves if need be". You can't do that now, with MS, and you cannot do that in the future, with MS.

Or, don't move - I'll still be around to say "I told you so", so at least I'll get to be all smug and stuff.

(NOTE: "Unsupportable" is different from "unsupported". The former is literally "Impossible to support" while the latter is "Vendor doesn't support it, but we can hire people to support it if need be")

Re: I love this crap

[Drethon]

Yeah but support it ourselves requires paying someone to support it. This requires more tax money. Keeping an old version of windows and not paying for upgrades is still cheaper, until the bottom falls out anyway.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, the worst thing that could happen to you is to work with a tablet. Write reports tapping on a screen? emails? hell no, give me a laptop. Nowadays upgrading the hardware is a bit ridiculous (barely any improvements in performance), like killing mosquitoes with a machine gun. Just upgrade the software.

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

You only need to pay someone if you have custom applications. The linux foundation takes care to support the kernel, just like other distributions have their own teams to support the rest of the software. Now, agency X needs a new/tailored software? then yes, the tax payer pays a team of developers to create/support that software (the same old IT staff can deploy it).

I'd rather do that than give my taxes away to another country (US in this case).

Re: I love this crap

[Kiuas]

Move to Linux. "Unsupportable" software becomes "support it ourselves if need be". You can't do that now, with MS, and you cannot do that in the future, with MS.

I fully agree with this as someone who works for IT side of the public health care sector of Finland. In fact the main project I'm currently in charge of which is an ERP overhaul project for hospital logistics is an Linux based project that saves us quite a lot money on the licensing costs alone. Most of the coding itself is done by a midsize Finnish software company.

However let me illuminate to you the difficulties of doing this at a large scale. A recent list I saw which is not comprehensive probably included 66 active systems currently in use by the hospital district. 6 of those, mine included, are Linux based, the rest are running on Windows. Why is this?

Well, the acquisition process itself is in its current shape such that it pretty much prevents small to midsize companies from bidding on major projects. The largest IT project going on at the moment is the replacement of the patient information system with a newer one that also unifies lab and imaging results systems and others directly to the patient files so that the treatment staff itself can access all relevant imaging lab and other data directly from the patient file itself without having to keep open several different systems at once like they still currently do.

We're a large hospital district, the largest in northern Europe. On a yearly basis we treat over a million people and as the most populated district in Finland we're also in charge of all highly specialized care. So needless to say that updating systems critical for the health and safety of over a million people is not exactly something to be done lightly.

Due to this projects of this size and scope are usually tendered out so that the tendering process itself contains a lot of terms and conditions limiting the size and type of companies that can even participate in the process. First of all they have to be on a stable enough basis monetarily, the financial/risk analysis by itself eliminates most smaller players directly from the game as they're deemed in too high risk of bankruptcy to be reliable.

The second thing that really cuts out the companies like the ones I'm currently working with from participating in these large scale projects past experience. Because the margin for error with acquisitions of this kind is so small, it is required that the companies have experience with providing similar systems using similar tech in the past 5 years to a similarly sized hospital area.

This pretty much narrows the options down a lot. And currently there are no open source players on the market that fill these conditions, as Linux based patient information systems are in their infancy at this point and have not been implemented at this scale yet.

Due to this the project is currently being developed by Epic Systems, an american megacorp. It's intended to enter use in 2019 with a total price tag of 385 million for the system itself, with a yearly price tag of around 40 million afterwards. How reliable these estimates are I cannot say, because outside proving technical support in the integration between logistics and the system itself I'm not involved in the management of the patient information system project itself and thus am going purely based on publicly available information.

The way forward here I think would be to set up a government owned IT company. Torvalds is Finnish after all so Linux is more widely used here than in many places so the expertise is there. The government could then pay for the development of large scale open source systems to be used by our public organizations. That's really the only feasible path to a more widespread adoption of open source systems in the public side, because the megacorporations currently in charge of this sphere - Epic included - are not going to be switching over to Linux and surrender their control of the product.

Re:I love this crap

[TheRaven64]

Most tablets support bluetooth keyboards these days, so when you're typing a lot you can use that. Most also support HDMI output, so you can dock them with a monitor if you need a larger display. The iPad Pro and MS Surface tablets offer a keyboard built into the case for when you're mobile, some Android tablets come with dockable keyboards.

Re: I love this crap

[TheRaven64]

You're paying anyway. Your choice is either pay Microsoft millions each year to get the bugs that Microsoft thinks are important fixed, have an upgrade cycle defined by Microsoft, and have new features that Microsoft thinks that people will like forced on you, or pay a similar amount to a company to support an open source system with the bugs and features that you care about prioritised and major version upgrades on a schedule that you define. In the former case, if you're unhappy, then sucks to be you. In the latter case, if you're unhappy then there are a dozen other companies begging to take the support contract away from your supplier.

Re:I love this crap

[AmiMoJo]

Complete nonsense.

For a start, XP has known unpatched vulnerabilities. But more importantly, you don't seem to understand how computer security works these days. When XP was new, one exploit would get you the keys to the kingdom, full access. Later versions introduced defence in depth, where its not just user/admin accounts any more, most stuff is virtualized or sandboxed to some degree and great effort is made to carefully separate data and executable code.

Running XP these days is suicide. Even if you keep it fully patched, even by stealing the ATM version patches with a registry hack, and even if carefully firewall it, look at what just happened. A seemingly legitimate update, required to keep accounting software up to date with the latest regulations, was infected, and AV software didn't detect it, and the user would have clicked through any warnings thinking that it was a legit update... The only thing that could have stopped it spreading was the security model in Windows 8.1/10 that prevented the SMB exploit being effective.

As for the spyware in Windows 10, that doesn't make it insecure. I makes it non-private, which is a different thing.

Re: I love this crap

[AmiMoJo]

Free software isn't free. Staff need re-training, incompatible equipment replacing, work-arounds for incompatible software need to be developed (if even possible)... Don't get me wrong, I think government should use free software for many reasons, but it isn't likely to save much, if any money.

Re:I love this crap

[TheRaven64]

You can. If you want it, I can put you in touch with a couple of companies that will offer you a fixed FreeBSD version with security backports. One of them was supporting FreeBSD 2.2.x[1] until a couple of years ago (not quite 20 years of support, but close). I know of at least one major US bank that runs FreeBSD 6 internally (and have only just finished their upgrade) and are paying for security backports and the occasional feature backport. The lack of SMP support was what eventually caused the last 2.x users to migrate: there are a bunch of things in new CPUs that required some reworking of kernel internals and it was cheaper to upgrade than try to backport them (and the backport would have looked so much like the new system that it wasn't worth it).

The community doesn't want to support a release for more than 5 years, but with any open source project with a decent-sized userbase you'll find a bunch of third parties that will happily take your money for longer support if you want it. Of course, it gets more expensive if you want other things, such as X11, some GNOME or KDE release, or whatever supported.

The real problem is there isn't a single entity that makes it easy to split the costs of doing so. The UK government could probably afford it quite easily, but most of these procurement decisions are made locally and the Metropolitan Police probably couldn't. You really need a critical mass of people to buy into the idea and split the costs between them: being the first (or only) customer wanting this is expensive!

[1] 2.x was released in 1994.

[2] 6 was released in 2005

Re: I love this crap

[fidomuh]

Paid software isn't free either. And if you think moving from Windows XP to 7 to 8 to 10 comes at less of a training cost, as moving to a *nix based system, you're simply wrong. The real caveat is that *nix admins are not cheap, they're not widely available and they often don't fit into the stereotypical view of an IT Supporter/Admin/Manager. Also, there's a real software hurdle, but as with everything, someone has to go first. If not, the monopoly never changes and we're all stuck with less secure, less serviceable and less innovative software. How governments are allowed to use closed software for critical systems and establishing a decade long dependency on 1 company, is beyond me. Bribery or incredible stupidity must be involved.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see that Microsoft's upgrade inducing fear campaign is being fully supporting by Slashdot eds. They even include the 'most secure version of Windows' tagline.

I assume this support is unwittingly provided.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

So, as an alternative to a laptop ... you're suggesting using a tablet ... adding an external keyboard because nobody can type for shit on the OSK ... adding an external monitor because nobody can see shit on a 10" display in desktop positioning ...

If only someone made a device that had the electronics, screen, and keyboard all in one slick package ...

Re:I love this crap

[TheRaven64]

The device I'd actually recommend is a tablet that comes with an OS that comes with a default security policy that only allows it to run sandboxed apps, that is easy to back up, and that runs the applications that they need to use. Currently, that means a tablet or phone, though the MS Surface laptop thingies would also work.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

/// Not so much nowdays, we seem to have hit "good enough": I'm not complaining, my work PC is plenty fast for what I do.

And as long as the hardware continues to perform adequately and support necessary software updates to ensure security is maintained, there is little reason to upgrade.

Unfortunately, I can see hardware vendors playing games with "supporting" software and vice versa, which is pushing us to replace hardware prematurely. Processor is plenty fast, but some chipset configuration isn't supported, or video drivers aren't written, or some other bullshit excuse to maintain the flow of hardware sales.

Re:I love this crap

[ausekilis]

This "no longer supported" nonsense needs to stop too. Microsoft released a patch for XP regarding the Samba flaw just a couple weeks ago. They (allegedly, anyway) still support XP for embedded systems such as ATMs and Point of Sale systems. I'd bet they still support it for any industry still willing to pay a service contract, including the gov.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

An iPad for word processing is ridiculous. A commodore 64 would be more productive.

Re:I love this crap

[dr.g]

Sooo...let me get this straight. It is consistent with some 'narrative' you have constructed that the government goes, hat in hand, to taxpayers (Is it just one taxpayer? Or a small group? Not real clear on how you suppose that works.) begging for money to upgrade the OS on a few million Fed computers...and the taxpayers say "No!"? Because Trump? Because stupid? Because conservative? Ummm....your narrative isn't real clear on this. My sole experiential datum is that they've never asked ME about it. But this apparently does happen, and has something to do with how superior you are to somebody else, right?

Amazingly, this happens despite the fervent desire of MS to sell more OSs, and the ability of our FedGov to pay for anything it wants in every other area by (apparently) using imaginary money in amounts generated by magical mathematics. I am at a loss to explain this, though it does suggest the possibility that since your little hypothesis entirely lacks predictive or explanatory power, it might indeed be nothing more than the lazy, stupid, politically-motivated narrative it appears to be. Only a Jeff Sessions-level intellect could come up with "The dumb conservatives have cut government spending so drastically that..." well, fuck, I can't really get past that without drifting off into some alternate universe...

(sry bout the Sessions crack. Nobody deserves that kind of vituperation)

Re: I love this crap

[Nunya666]

How about using free software to begin with, the manpower argument is nil because you're spending more on keeping this old crap running.

Unfortunately, most members of management are too ignorant, naive, and/or arrogant to recognize that, even when it is pointed out to them.

They buy into the marketing hype of M$, Oracle, and SAP, and then expect their IT departments to implement the crapware that they just bought.

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

I love reading comments like yours, because, obviously, you have never supported Windows in an Enterprise environment...

Before I begin, I have to point out I have been using Linux since the 90s, and actually worked for a company whose software ran on Unix, so I have experience in that realm.

You need to understand that many industries, schools, businesses and government agencies use certain pieces of software that are critical to their mission. These pieces of software run on Windows and nothing else. These pieces of software also many times only run on certain versions of Windows. These mission critical apps are the most important thing used by the users, whether we are talking patient management, inventory control, etc; Because these mission critical applications run only on Windows, and usually only on a certain version, these industries, schools, businesses and government agencies are in a tight spot regarding how to manage their OS choices. They are locked in because of whatever mission critical app they use. Get it?

Sure, if someone is only using Office type apps, web browsing, etc(in other words, generic and ubiquitous software that could be run from a tablet of via a browser...) this means THEY AREN'T RUNNING MISSION CRITICAL APPLICATIONS. Get it?

Again, I run Linux at home and at work, and have for years, and am a big proponent of OSS.

However, every time I read comments like yours it shows how incredibly naive you and the rest who modded you up are.

Re:I love this crap

[strikethree]

You should not be modded downwards, but then, you should have never been modded up either.

You said:

The problem is that while the government fully recognises (sic) that upgrading is worthwhile, convincing tax payers that spending millions on upgrading computers is a valid thing to do is nigh on impossible.

The person above you said:

It's called managing your resources. Or maybe "scare the government into giving us more money than we need cuz look how outdated we are". Either way, the folks in charge need to be fired and the entire culture changed.

Let me re-target the discussion for you: An entity gets $x amount (through profits/taxes/whatever) to perform certain things. Management is supposed to manage $x in such a way as to ensure the proper performance of the entity.

You seem to be under the impression that the normal operation of the entity should not include budgeting resources for upkeep of the software and hardware environment. To restate what you are implying: Normal upkeep costs should always be an external expense.

If there are enough resources to upgrade from XP to 8.1 then there are resources to go from XP to 10.

This is not primarily about money. This is about an organisation that is so brittle that the organization as a whole is ineffective. What is the answer to this situation? Well, the grandparent already told you: "Either way, the folks in charge need to be fired and the entire culture changed. "

I hope this helped you. :)

Re:I love this crap

[Rockoon]

convincing tax payers

Since when have politicians needed to convince taxpayers before throwing massive sums of money around?

They havent in my lifetime.

Re:I love this crap

[strikethree]

Fired? The person who wouldn't give them a budget to upgrade is Prime Minister now.
It was a deliberate "austerity" policy.

Um, if someone has the ability to allocate resources then they are part of management. The implication is obvious.

I guess as long as The Met can claim that it was the politicians and the politicians can blame the Met, the situation never needs to get fixed. For myself, it is all government and it has become ineffective at what is is supposed to do and should be fired/removed from responsibility.

I am going to build a guillotine. Hopefully I can put it to good use sooner rather than later. Vive la France!

Re: I love this crap

[James Carnley]

Move to Linux. "Unsupportable" software becomes "support it ourselves if need be". You can't do that now, with MS, and you cannot do that in the future, with MS.

If they can't support their systems running Windows, which is much easier to maintain and have user's accept, then they definitely won't be able to support Linux on their shoestring budget. Supporting software themselves? Hah.

Re: I love this crap

[Rob Y.]

And the answer to 'mission critical apps' is probably to isolate them on a Citrix server somewhere - and give users Chromebooks with a Citrix client in order to access those apps. Then everything that's not those apps can be done in a secure environment, and those - presumably trusted - apps can run safely on their sandboxed Citrix servers with any unnecessary network access disabled.

Then start spending your go forward Windows upgrade budget on replacing those apps with web-based equivalents.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of handouts to buy votes perhaps the government should spend its over seven hundred billion pounds on doing actual government stuff like responsible adults.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM and others consistently roll out truly global scale software and hardware projects on a microscopic fraction of that amount of money.

The problem, as usual, is government and its extreme incompetence, mismanagement, corruption, and stupidity.
Those in our governments aren't serving us and keeping our interests in mind: otherwise they'd let us keep more of our money and waste less of our taxes buying votes from the indolent.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Just upgrade the software.

This is the Met - they have probably only just upgraded to Pentium4s. Upgrade to Core-2 would be massive (except for those plods only capable of keeping up with a P3). And who is going to pay for all the DDR? When the money could be better spend on overtime to write the reports in longhand?

Tablets? This is the Police. Police stations have criminals in - they would nick the tablets!

Re: I love this crap

[Anne Thwacks]

pay Microsoft millions each year to get the bugs that Microsoft thinks are important

FTFY

Re: I love this crap

[BadDreamer]

Even if companies like Epic switch over to Linux they do not surrender control of the product. There is no need to open the source code for the product; only make a shim layer which allows it to run, and add a different authorization mechanism than tying the instance to a specific OS instance.

This is a great thing for the megacorporations as well, as they will lower support costs (without necessarily lowering support revenue - on the contrary, probably) and will be able to compete better as they can devote more resources to implementation of new features as they no longer have to play catch-up with various Windows updates.

The only real obstacle is inertia.

Re: I love this crap

[Anne Thwacks]

How is it then that they pretend to be Out In Front of technology.. and laying out our collective future?

Currently, there would appear to be two alternative answers:

a) Your collective future is Windows 95 with IE6
b) Your collective future involves MS going broke and everyone switching to Linux

The wicked witch of the west currently has my crystal ball, so I cannot supply further details at this particular point in time. You might wish to call back later.

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on your definition of "reasonably" and what the computer is to be used for. If it has one purpose, e.g. interfacing with old hardware, and it is physically secure, so only trusted staff operate it, then you can make it reasonably secure.

Re:I love this crap

[beelsebob]

You seem to be operating under a weird delusion that the managers of entities like the met police have free reign over what the money they're given is spent on.

In practice, the government will send down orders like "we must find efficiency savings, without cutting front line policing services". Successive governments use this drive for "more efficiency" to get into office, and put successive pressure on these organizations to cut everything that is not absolutely 100% essential to the doors staying open right this moment. At some point "non essential" maintenance ends up on the chopping block.

Once again - the cause of this kind of thing is not some fundamental mismanagement, or people at the top who don't think that making sure the computer systems are maintained is important - instead, it's that "we found lots of efficiency savings, and saved the tax payer billions" plays much better when trying to get elected than "you know, the police don't have a 20 year out of date computer system now".

Re:I love this crap

[dbIII]

I guess as long as The Met can claim that it was the politicians and the politicians can blame the Met

With the greatest possible respect (ie. I'm sure despite the utterly clueless comment above you are quite good at something) there has been a deliberate policy of drastic funding cuts in policing over the last few years so it's extremely obvious that the Minister was the one responsible and not some convenient blame deflection. May was PROUD of her cuts.

Re:I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the Met were using VDIs/Citrix desktops?

Re:I love this crap

[strikethree]

With the greatest possible respect always means that you wish to heap tons of disrespect upon someone but are too civilized to go down that route. Don't worry, I am used to abuse. Be as rude as your inner self wants you to be. Nobody else holds back, why should you?

Anyways, yes. I realize how things work, my comment was about how they are working the wrong way... but whatever. I should not expect anyone to actually think about any of the obvious implications of my words and I should spell every concept out like I am speaking to someone in kindergarten. The only problem with that is if I want speak about anything deeper than colours being pretty, it becomes a TL;DR.

Ah well. Such is life. Have a nice day. I will not bother to comment on any of your comments again. If I do, feel free to tear me a new one but keep in mind it was done only because I did not pay enough attention.

Re:I love this crap

[strikethree]

If you have authority over spending, you are part of management. Reread my words and stop thinking of things being structured the way you were told they were structured. What you are describing is just a contorted form of blame passing... but yeah, you can think it was purely May and your opponent can think it was all purely the upper echelons of the police force and nothing will ever get done... because you participate gladly.

I doubt you will understand what I am getting at. No big deal. Long story short, you blame May and you are correct that some blame lies there. We can let it be here as there is no hope for you to understand anything deeper than "he did it! no, she did it!".

Have a nice day. :)

Re:I love this crap

[Wolfrider]

--You can. Obtain $MONEY and upgrade to a mainframe.

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

convincing tax payers that spending millions on upgrading computers is a valid thing to do is nigh on impossible.

what do you have to say about Billions of dollars spent on developing hacking/snooping tools by Ï$A and ©|A

Re:I love this crap

[MercTech]

Why upgrade from XP? XP runs the VT100 terminal emulator to interface with the VAX that has all the data on it anyway. (snark snark)

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is not about upgrading, it's about not being able to secure networks. Think of a car. The security in that is good enough to work for 20 years. The security of a firewall, OS and AV lasts how long?

Re: I love this crap

[Anonymous Coward]

a "real admin" can't do anything against something like the slammer virus. Security holes are security holes, and putting duct tape on a bullet hole won't stop a boat from sinking.

Re: I love this crap

[beastofburdon]

Bribery or incredible stupidity must be involved.

Copious amounts of both are involved at all levels of government, but I'm leaning toward bribery considering we have a a vast amount of historical evidence that it has been happening for decades in hundreds of governments.

Win XP still gets updates ...

[CaptainDork]

... after a registry hack to tell it it's an ATM (or other embedded).

To apply the hack, create a text file with a .reg extension and the contents below:

        Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
        [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\PosReady]
        "Installed"=dword:00000001

Re:Win XP still gets updates ...

[antdude]

But is that supported in Home and Pro versions? IIRC, MS said no.

Re:Win XP still gets updates ...

[postglock]

That article itself linked to a follow up from the same author, who doesn't recommend doing this hack for several reasons. He also says that updates for embedded XP was scheduled to end in April 2016.

Re:Win XP still gets updates ...

[Anonymous Coward]

if you want to throw money at xp you can still get updates for at least a couple more years without hacking the registry and tricking windows update. that is probably what they're doing, cheaper short-term to stay on what they have.

windows 10 is a total piece of shit, you really want them switching to that instead? they're better off where they are for now; and also with the switch to 8.1 instead of 10.

hopefully by 2023 microsoft realizes their fuck up and actually releases a usable windows 10 - one that returns control back to the user, that doesn't brick on every other update, that doesn't totally saturate a net connection for multi gigabyte updates, and doesn't spy on users if they don't want to be spied upon.

Re:Win XP still gets updates ...

[edis]

For Pro works, of course, haven't tried Home, but see no big reason to not registry in the very same fashion.

Re:Win XP still gets updates ...

[PmanAce]

windows 10 is a total piece of shit,

How so? Care to list your points compared to XP?

Re:Win XP still gets updates ...

[CaptainDork]

Could look it up.

I'm still getting WEPOS updates.

The surplus computers are running cheap security cameras in hostile environments.

"most secure version of Windows right now."

[Anonymous Coward]

Which version is that? 3.1?

Re:"most secure version of Windows right now."

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably since there is no IP networking

Re:"most secure version of Windows right now."

[by (1706743)]

Tangentially related, Windows 3.1 was supported until *after* the 9/11 attacks.

For some reason that sort of freaks me out (semi-relevant XKCD).

Re:"most secure version of Windows right now."

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be, because nobody honestly can believe that Windows 10 "The Spyware Edition" is something you should use in a secure environment.

Virtualization?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't they take a copy of the hard-disk drive and load it into a virtual machine like VMware running on Linux?

Or why isn't it possible to just virtualize a hard disk drive? I have tried this myself, and the biggest problem is getting the hard disk drive ID's to match inside the VM, since Windows does all sorts of hardware ID checks to make sure it is a bootleg copy.

Re:Virtualization?

[IonOtter]

Running a VM doesn't take all that much in terms of processor power, but it requires a lot of memory (RAM), usually around 4GB or more. The problem is that 4GB is right at the limit of what XP can use. You want to have at least 8GB of RAM to run smoothly, but that means you have to upgrade to Win7-64 at the very least.

And even if you're running a VM, the machine can still be infected, and act like a vector to spread the virus through the network. So you have to have a firewall and virus scanner, just like a hardware machine.

And since we're dealing with previously unknown zero-days, neither of those are of much use. Indeed, they may be worse than useless, as we're starting to find out.

Re:Virtualization?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Ummm, because if they're running >10 year-old OS software, they're running it on >10 year-old HARDWARE? Picture VMWare on 3 Ghz Pentiums with 2 Gb of memory, a 512K VGA card and an IDE drive.

Re:Virtualization?

[Anonymous Coward]

VMs are a terrible way to manage your security profile. VMs are a way to manage your configurations or scale your operations.

You don't run a vulnerable OS on top of a vulnerable hypervisor.
You run your vulnerable OS on top of a razor thin verifiable bootloader using a more trustworthy kernel.
Your hypervisor should have minimal configuration.

Otherwise you're replacing a hard security problem with a harder security problem and hoping the "harderness" makes it take longer to break.

Re:Virtualization?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't they take a copy of the hard-disk drive and load it into a virtual machine like VMware running on Linux?

That doesn't fix the security problem. We're a Microsoft contractor, so we're still required to run XP. Just because we run XP on a vm doesn't fix the security problems. The VM is still running on our internal network. It sucks being so tied-into Microsoft.

Re: Virtualization?

[guruevi]

Virtualization is older than a Pentium. IN modern times QEmu has been around forever and even the Mac PPC platform had a pretty decent x86 emulator.

Re:Virtualization?

[Anonymous Coward]

Picture VMWare on 3 Ghz Pentiums with 2 Gb of memory, a 512K VGA card and an IDE drive.

Look at the little kid who can regurgitate stuff he heard adults talk about.

First of all, kid, 3GHz Pentiums never existed, 2GB of RAM was unheard of in the Pentium days and 512K VGA cards were long obsolete by the Pentium days. You just threw a hodgepodge of random era terms together and claimed that they belong together, like a clueless child.

Second, kid, is that VMWare ran perfectly fine on Pentium class machines. You wouldn't know because you weren't even alive when people were doing exactly that.

Re: Virtualization?

[Zero__Kelvin]

I regularly run a Fedora VM on an ASUS T100 with 2GB RAM while continuing to use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Libre Office on the Win 10 host. Your claim is bullshit.

Re:Virtualization?

[Big Hairy Ian]

The problem is that 4GB is right at the limit of what XP can use.

I'm pretty sure XP had a 64bit version which could address more than 4GB

Re:Virtualization?

[Dagger2]

It did. Actually the 32-bit version supported up to 64 GB of RAM; the 4 GB limit is a licensing restriction. (The limit of 4 GB of address space per process is however technical and does require 64-bit to increase.)

Of course this all seems a bit backwards, because the idea was to run XP in a VM, not run VMs on XP. The high memory requirements for VMs are on the host, not on the guests.

I'll just leave these random questions lying here.

[rakslice]

How does the current support level of the XP-based POSReady version (the Windows version for bespoke embedded device use), which is still receiving patches until 2019, compare with the support level of Windows 8.1?

Windows is not the way.

[Gravis Zero]

I'm sorry but if you are serious about security and long-term stability (decades) then Windows isn't the way. Sure, no OS is perfect but that doesn't means you should choose to drink raw sewage because filtered water isn't really pure water. Honestly, they should be using some minimal version of FreeBSD with an minimalistic or possibly text interface. Progress is good but only if you are heading in the right direction.

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with your suggestion is that sometimes people need to use computers to do things. If you ever need to install any real non-laughable software, you're not likely to find anything that runs on your suggesed OS.

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is document processing and image processing non-laughable? Is media capture and processing non-laughable? Is Is software development non-laughable? Is general web browsing and email non-laughable? All that software runs on my PC and it isn't running windows. Shucks, I can't run that $60 dollar game. Oh well.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[freeze128]

Are you kidding?

Honestly, they should be using some minimal version of FreeBSD with an minimalistic or possibly text interface.

Have you EVER met a government employee? Do you think they can handle an OS with a text-only interface?

Re: Windows is not the way.

[lucm]

So you think cops will do "media capture and processing" or software development? They don't even trust them with guns, you think they'll give them C++ compilers?

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with your suggestion is that sometimes people need to use computers to do things. If you ever need to install any real non-laughable software, you're not likely to find anything that runs on your suggesed OS.

You have Linux subsystem for Windows, which admittedly I've not much used. What is needed is a windows subsystem for Linux, or to put it more accurately you need to be able to run windows containers on linux. It likely wouldn't be quite as fast as running windows on windows, but as long as opengl and directx ran well the potential would be there. That kind of functionality microsoft might be able to sell.

In short, sometimes virtualization just isn't fast enough. These days that mostly deals with video acceleration. Some virtualization options use specialty video cards to offload remote sessions, but that is a special case.

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

When's the last time you used Linux/BSD?

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Until I can run things like SolidWorks or Adobe Premiere natively then Linux isn't going to cut it.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[AHuxley]

It is for the UK gov and mil to track its own staff.
The UK cannot afford to create its own programming language, make its own police OS, code its own apps, have 24/7 support for its own UK OS and have perfect vetting for all its police.
The educational efforts of the 1980's to educate a lot of computer ready workers failed. All the computer hardware used in schools all over the UK did not result in a huge uptake of computer education and create skilled experts.
So the UK has generations of staff who know of a Windows GUI, how to use some Windows productive apps and played computer games on Windows or early consoles.
Any real experts are lost to the private sector, other nations with better wages and conditions, get great work and conditions with the GCHQ/mil/special forces and cannot help the police.
So the police have US OS they know, a network that have to enter data into, can sort and get data from, 24/7 support. A police network that is separated from other mil/gov networks.
That aspect is vital. The UK has to keep its domestic mil/special forces methods secure and well away from gov workers, courts, lawyers, telco workers, staff with faith issues, workers who are loyal to the own nation, very well funded human rights groups, the media and people passing/giving/selling information to anyone.

The other part is in the tracking of how staff use a Windows network. The media, a criminal, faith group asks for a term, name or phone number or project to be searched.
Someone in the UK gov uses a password and searches, reporting the results given the networks they have access too or account used.
A US OS is very good at logs of any and all search terms and who requested that search per machine, per network. The networks are not just for looking up criminals, they watch the gov workers per machine (keyboard logs to counter VPN, any unexpected quality encryption) and then as expected at application, OS, network level.

Great for tracking staff and their interesting search terms. Searching for a project they never had access to? Why are they looking for that?
XP is been used to study the usage habit of all staff. If the skilled staff understand their own networks they would find the logs and collecting software.
Better to just have an XP GUI and keep it all very boring. If a new system of hardware and software, OS is installed, staff might hesitate to enter requested search terms given the old system never reported their searches...
The old hardware and software was not logged and they never got questioned about a search, so they keep on feeling safe and search.
Keeping XP keeps staff trusting the old system that just cant be tracking them...
XP software and hardware is kept for its generational social engineering value to keep staff feeling secure.
Older staff feel they have never been faced questions when using XP for searches. New staff feel XP might not log every search network wide and so enter search terms.
The security services have always understood big changes in the office hardware change generation habits.
Why create new trust issues and induce new more secure usage patterns well away from networks, XP and hardware that logs every keystroke.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[markdavis]

>"The UK cannot afford to create its own programming language, make its own police OS, code its own apps, have 24/7 support for its own UK OS and have perfect vetting for all its police."

Right. So install and use CentOS for free (and the myriad of apps, including LibreOffice) and contract one of the many places for support. Have your GUI and a hardened, reliable, world-class, long-term, regularly-updated OS. Take the money you save on licensing and unnecessary hardware updates and malware payments, and use it to retrain your IT people. For key industry-specific apps, band together with other police departments, pool the money, and contract it to be coded to OSS that doesn't tie you to MS-Windows. Break free and move on and reap the benefits for decades to come. Instead of constant pain, take a big, very bitter pill once and solve the problem "forever".

Re:Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha!

Re:Windows is not the way.

[AHuxley]

Staff would not then search for a term suggested by the press, criminals, their faith, cult on such an advanced new system.
They would fear it and all the logs it keeps.
Tracking of gov staff would become more difficult as gov staff stopped using interesting search terms that the security services could watch for.
Staff could just search on XP and never faced any issues about results. New staff who might be loyal to other nations, be politically active, have to do tasks for their faith, be criminal or who just wanted to sell information would see the that trust change in their colleagues, superiors and peers.
The work place has a trust of XP software and hardware. The key logger (software and hardware) has worked for generations of staff and the security services are always waiting for something interesting.
The use of police database searches and culture in the UK was shaped by the Irish issues of the 1970's and early computer databases. Every police offerer was expect to listen for accents, look for cars that are new to the area, people that have just moved to an area reported by land lords. A lot of data was entered and results kept, files created. That freedom and ability to search, create a file, add to file, request more information is what made the UK police the best.
It also allowed the security services to kept their secrets well away for the media, police, criminals, lawyers wanting to find methods.
A new complex system slows searches as staff wonder about been questioned over computer use, makes very interesting people on the staff cautious and curious. They go back to their faith group, criminal group, media contact and ask all about the new system in person, face to face.
Experts get consulted face to face, the interesting person is told face to face to stop all interesting searches on the new networks. The security services lose their easy flow of generations of logs, names, phone numbers, license plates and keywords criminals, faith groups, the media have a constant and unexpected interest in.
Low level spies might also search their own names a lot, for any new counter spy operations, events in the media or try to push their clearance level to limits no other loyal staff on average attempts. An old computer system/network helps with such feelings given years and decades of trust and never been questioned.
Changes to once totally trusted hardware, work areas, software can induce or create thoughts of hardware key loggers, cameras, software logs and interesting staff totally alter/stop their methods.
The security services then have to wonder why a person of interest has gone dark that their daily flashes of interesting searches have totally stopped.
Has that interesting person of faith on the staff just been warned to be more careful about the new computer or something more interesting?

Staff vetting is now reduced to trying to track interesting gov staff. In the past people who are a risk would have never been cleared for any police work but party politics has totally altered security clearances away for any aspect of security vetting in the past decade. So an old computer system is the only way to try and understand every new police officer. The granted freedom to search for anything usually finds the interesting people.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[Gravis Zero]

All you do is claim what people cannot do. You greatly underestimate your common man.

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't you be better asking Adobe to produce a Linux version rather than bitching to Linux about making magic happen?

Re:Windows is not the way.

[AHuxley]

The problem is the "common people" are getting deeper access in the gov and secrets are walking out due to poor or no vetting.
Interning people are getting more gov jobs and for some reason get police clearances.
Staff keep on giving or selling information due to politics, faith, another nation they are more loyal to or the need for cash.
Lawyers and activist human rights groups demand total access to security service methods in open courts via police reports.
Interesting people then change their methods thanks to their lawyers, legal teams. Better just to hint it was an informant in court.
An old system that cannot be searched in an easy way is great to fully comply with a very legal request to search and to find no results due to the type of old systems.
To provide a new UK only computer system is not going to help keep secrets, be easy to teach, be easy to support as a GUI or track staff.
Lawyers will want to be able to search that new police system to find issues of faith/politics/evidence that could be used in open court.
Only the GCHQ and other trusted mil/special forces/clandestine services get their own trusted, bespoke OS, secure computer networks.
The good new, fast computer systems exist but for very different reasons.
A good reason exists to why a set of old software and hardware is keep in some gov services and not others.
Entire networks/systems have to be logged by the security services due to staff issues. The existing keystroke recording system is in place and works very well.
The security services get the upgrades. The police trust XP for generations. Lawyers/political reformers cant request a national search on older isolated networks after whistleblowers leak projects/operations..
Lawyers and human rights groups cant shape the creation of a new police database for their own access and have to work within the limits of a much older isolated system.

The wonders of total compartmentalization and full staff tracking can be supported for decades.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[Darinbob]

The typical IT desk mantra is to get the latest OS always. But that latest Windows OS is a major screwup. The users hate it and it's not actually providing extra security, although the word "security" does show up in the marketing more than others. But everyone knows IT is just a marketing arm of Microsoft due to the hiring practice of only hiring those with Microsoft certificates which trains you to be an expert at marketing Microsoft products.

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

If your "minimalistic or possibly text interface" version of FreeBSD suggested by the GP can do image processing, media capture and processing, software development and general web-browsing, then yes, that's non-laughable.

If you're not running a "minimalistic or possibly text interface" version of FreeBSD, then you're comparing apples with oranges.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you want a Windows version that is sending telemetry about "nobody knows what" to "who knows" in a Police environment?
Really? Some people are so blind....

Re:Windows is not the way.

[schleimkeim]

Have fun training all those users to actually use something like BSD. Oh and good luck finding someone to give you IT support with that.

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right.. UK police is the best.. good one
Just look at all the shit that happens in the UK and it all could be prevented by doing some good old police work..

Re:Windows is not the way.

[Dutch Gun]

Yes, and all that costs you is the ability to run and deploy the software that's critical to your infrastructure.

I happen to know someone who works in a small city IT dept. As far as I understand it, they're a 100% Windows department, mostly because all the software the city uses is available on Windows. Unless that software the city depends upon actually runs and works on the OS you're advocating, there's precisely zero chance it will ever happen. There is some very specialized (and expensive) software that, for instance, police departments use internally for most of its day to day operations. If there's any alternative OS support, it's for mobile like Android or iPad, so officers can connect to city systems and access data remotely using an iPad or similar device.

So, no. No one is going to be switching to FreeBSD, because none of the software they actually need to use is available on FreeBSD. It would be great if this weren't the case and we had more competition on the desktop, but wishing it were otherwise doesn't change the hard reality of the situation.

Re: Windows is not the way.

[AHuxley]

AC consider the methods used to track bad people, the science, the ability to find bad people before the "internet".
How the UK set up the CIB, DIB, the use of a Home Office Warrant, IPI, JIC, LIC, SLO and was able to move information in from all over the Empire.
How to get around most other nations embassy encryption methods.
How people or groups of people doing interesting things had to be found in the UK or trying to enter the UK.
Long term a lot of good methods and very new science got perfected.
The support for and advancement of early DNA testing?

Re doing some good old police work? Politics is now reducing vetting and wants to see contractors and the private sector rewarded.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. I recently spent a year training a former SWAT cop in Linux based networking, package management, and software integration. Had a blat, he was the only sys-admin I'd ever met who was notably scarier than *me*. I've disarmed knives and even an axe, he's done guns.

Good guy: got out of police work for better money for his family.

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Bert64]

I do indeed do software development on a minimalistic text based system...
I do some image processing in a text based environment (automated image processing)..
And i do media capture in a text based environment...

Windows is aiming to be a jack of all trades, but most organisations only need to use a small subset of its functionality, and often different subsets depending on specific tasks within that organisation. Use a tool which is suited to the task at hand. Any additional functionality that you don't require is an unnecessary overhead and potential weakness.

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Bert64]

What you're thinking about already exists and is called "Wine"...
It's not as complete or compatible as the linux subsystem for windows, and that's both because windows is massively over complicated as well as being proprietary and closed source. It's much easier to clone the behaviour of linux because you have lots of documentation and source code to study.

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you think cops will do "media capture and processing" or software development? They don't even trust them with guns, you think they'll give them C++ compilers?

Web applications running on internal servers, or even command line / terminal applications, are more than sufficient for law enforcement agencies.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding?

Honestly, they should be using some minimal version of FreeBSD with an minimalistic or possibly text interface.

Have you EVER met a government employee? Do you think they can handle an OS with a text-only interface?

Government employees used to use MS-DOS for years.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[trawg]

I'm sorry but if you are serious about security and long-term stability (decades) then Windows isn't the way.

Are there any Linux-based desktop-focused distributions that have the longevity of Windows?

I am still running my 2004 version of SecureCRT and my 1999 version of Multiedit (less often). I just copy their directories between computers and have done since I bought these way back when.

I tend to run my Windows OSs until literally the day they stop maintaining them (I liked to stress test the development teams I worked with by being the one person in the office that wasn't running the latest & greatest so could always compatibility test things) and have always been thoroughly impressed with its long-term stability and backwards compatibility above all else.

By comparison I maintain a Mint Linux VM in VirtualBox and it is such an exercise in frustration. Every dist-upgrade I do seems to break something minor.

I think it's too big an ask to say they should just be using some text-based interface. There are significant productivity advantages with modern networked software. It should be obvious now that the price of using any such system is vigilance when it comes to updates.

If you buy a copy of Windows the day it comes out and turn on automatic updates you are going to be as safe as possible and you can be extremely confident that your software will keep working thanks to MSs vigorous attempts to ensure backwards compatibility (generally) - and if you break the cost of that Windows license down over the lifespan of modern hardware you'll probably come out ahead - Windows 10 apparently will EOL in 2025, which is a pretty good run.

I'm not an MS fanboy by any means (almost everything I do outside of my desktop is on Linux) but I still think it's near I can SSH to one of my servers using a copy of SecureCRT I bought 13+ years ago.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[jabuzz]

For good measure a number of the lead CentOS developers are based in the UK.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[goose-incarnated]

So the UK has generations of staff who know of a Windows GUI, how to use some Windows productive apps and played computer games on Windows or early consoles.

So, the staff can handle the change from Windows classic interface to Windows 10, but they can't handle the change from Windows classic interface to KDE? Nor Gnome?

I'm afraid that the "trained in Windows UI" argument is well and truly lost - the smartphone take-up demonstrated without a doubt that people can easily pick up a new interface and use it.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[ls671]

Yes, but they have since retired and millennials have replaced them.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[ls671]

Of course it is more secure because it is new and closed source.
hehe

Just wait for while although...

Re:Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

he was the only sys-admin I'd ever met who was notably scarier than *me*.

creimer, is that you?

Re: Windows is not the way.

[fidomuh]

I'd like to point out that many law enforcement agencies run web-based embedded systems anyway, so the underlying system could EASILY be BSD, Linux or whatever. Currently, at least where I'm from, they use Windows XP Embedded, but having seen the backend I'd reckon they could swap it out and the only thing they'd notice was the switch from MS Office to LibreOffice. Maybe they'd notice a lack of ransomware attacks too, but you never know.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[ls671]

Great! Basically, we have been pwned and there is nothing we can ever do about it. It is just the way it is, like the sun rising every morning.

We may as well accept it. That's for our own good after all.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[ls671]

I'm not an MS fanboy by any means (almost everything I do outside of my desktop is on Linux) but I still think it's near I can SSH to one of my servers using a copy of SecureCRT I bought 13+ years ago.

hmm... you sure seem to enjoy proprietary stuff and to be well trained in MS concepts although.

I never had any problems logging into SSH servers without SecureCRT and I still run some servers with patched versions of slackware from 1997. Some running XVNC GUIs.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[trawg]

hmm... you sure seem to enjoy proprietary stuff and to be well trained in MS concepts although.

Hah! I mostly enjoy just doing what I want to do and not having to fight the OS every step of the way. FWIW I run almost exclusively open source software on my desktop wherever possible (looking at my list of applications open at the moment I have Firefox (my primary browser), VLC, Launchy and Notepad++ :)

Don't get me wrong - I would love to see more en masse migration to Linux on the desktop. But every time I've tried (and I make a concerted effort every few years) I just run into a laundry list of problems. There are only a few things I keep Windows around for now - games + some Adobe products.

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

You cheap Linux fucks wouldn't pay for it anyhow.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

minimalistic or possibly text interface.

Minus the operator error scenarios. Even micro controllers today have enough power to perform basic input validation and even little context relevancy search with the help of the national or station clouds or patrol car cloudlets. But no, such systems are not implemented even if the statistics show that half of the email users have leaked confidential information due to typing a wrong address, for example. The police information systems should be able run at least in a limited form under a severe solar storm or radiological conditions, integrated into gear of clothing if necessary, or run in space...by switching the configurable knobs of the architecture.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[geekmux]

I'm sorry but if you are serious about security and long-term stability (decades) then Windows isn't the way. Sure, no OS is perfect but that doesn't means you should choose to drink raw sewage because filtered water isn't really pure water. Honestly, they should be using some minimal version of FreeBSD with an minimalistic or possibly text interface. Progress is good but only if you are heading in the right direction.

Consumers are a considerable part of the problem with insecurity, because they will prefer functionality over security every time.

Is it possible to make Microsoft OS secure? Sure. Remove the GUI, disable file sharing protocols, and reduce it to a powershell box.

Is it possible to make a smartphone secure? Sure. Disable all app installs and cloud sync, remove unnecessary apps, and secure with 8-digit PIN.

Will consumers find these products useful after securing them? No, not really. They want to have their cake and eat it too, which is exactly the kind of crap they would demand with any other OS, eventually turning it into a backwards-compatible-cloud-sync shitpile, which tends to describe exactly what we have today.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[Gravis Zero]

holy shit dude, try to condense your thoughts into a small logical compact form. i'm not reading your stream of consciousness posts.

Re:Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you EVER met a government employee? Do you think they can handle an OS with a text-only interface?

Yes and yes. I'd add more, but the question seems pretty stupid and insulting.

Re: Windows is not the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're thinking about already exists and is called "Wine"...
It's not as complete or compatible as the linux subsystem for windows, and that's both because windows is massively over complicated as well as being proprietary and closed source. It's much easier to clone the behaviour of linux because you have lots of documentation and source code to study.

I had wine in mind when I wrote the post, but forgot to mention it. At any rate, if wine were to just work then you would be done. The last time I tried it for sketchup and spent a couple hours on it I ended up with failure with a crash before long. I'd rather pay microsoft $100 for a license for a version of "wine" that works, if such a thing existed. Wine did, however, have the graphics performance I wanted, so it is getting there. It just needs to be made reliable, which may be near impossible without microsofts help.

If the wine team had more resources you might be able to focus on projects such as sketchup and all the rest, but somehow get a debugger involved so you can trace out the failures and improve wine. I suspect windows relative stability is not so much good design but a lot of hard work. That is problematic in that you have to somehow reverse engineer all the special case handling as well as all the rest.

I blame the public

[jmccue]

Welcome to Public Spending, you see things like this everywhere. No money to fund Gov agencies. Makes one wonder if it is due to graft or incompetence or something else.

I blame the public, the vast majority will talk about a celebrity's sex life or a bunch of millionaires running around on a playing field like the world depends upon it. But knowing or really caring about what an elected official does, no one cares. So we end up with a majority of officials who only cares about themselves and how much they can skim for themselves or family/friends.

Can we stop pretending XP is dead?

[thogard]

Forms of XP are still being sent out on brand new systems and will be for years. These devices tend to be the all in one industrial computers or the ones that integrate with car systems like the ones used in police cars. Because no one is making a secure browsers for XP anymore (developers repeat the lie "it isn't supported by MS anymore"), their users may be leaking data about you.

Free support for home XP users stopped but to many, it is still a current product. While it would be great to have it disappear, I expect its use will far outlive Windows 10 simply because of the old hardware the can't run anything newer that is often attached to even more expensive hardware in a way the prevents upgrades.

Re:Can we stop pretending XP is dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

The UK government is paying big money for Microsoft to keep supporting XP at a whole bunch of various agencies. It's not just one London police force.

Re:Can we stop pretending XP is dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're not pretending it's dead, more like undead. MS should have disabled the default-route-field and all proxy settings on the day supported ended.

Also, if your hardware can run windows xp, but no 7 or eight, the box is *at least* 10 years old. If you cannot affort (or in the case of the london police, don't want to spend money or are incapable of replacing 18'000 pc's, because they where surprised by the sudden sunsetting of xp), then stop using computers at all.

Re:Can we stop pretending XP is dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would it be great to have it disappear?

Windows XP was Microsoft's high water mark. All of its OSs since then have consistently gotten worse, barely usable, buggy messes.

There is nothing new of any value in post-XP OSs except perhaps security upgrades that could have been added to XP as a service pack.

I want XP back.

Re:Can we stop pretending XP is dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had many non-computer appliances last 20, 30 or more years.

There's no good reason computer hardware can't last that long, too. Heck, I've got one desktop from the 1990s that has plenty of capacity for what I need it to do as a mixed, offline Windows XP/Linux box.

Despite what you think, 10 years isn't old. It's practically brand new.

Re:Can we stop pretending XP is dead?

[Jetstream]

Seconded. They'll have to pry XP from my cold, dead keyboard!

I hate to be that guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but "18,000 PCs is?" We have this word, "are," for when you have more than one thing. You should look into that.

Re:I hate to be that guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they expect it to be only one, singular, disaster - hence "is" - while a more pessimistic approach would be to view it as 18,000 individual disasters waiting to happen.

Will they arrest themselves for negligence?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is incredibly pathetic, how did it even come to this?!

Why Windows 8.1

[Anonymous Coward]

I can understand if they only wanted to upgrade to Windows 7 (the best OS ever made by Microsoft) but why windows 8.1 - that's such a lemon.. Windows 10 is also a lemon... what a joke!

Re:Why Windows 8.1

[Anonymous Coward]

8.1 custom images can rival 7. Better display support and you just remove metro.

Re:Why Windows 8.1

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 8.1 is the latest version of Windows where you can disable all the spyware, isn't it?. The police may not want to send confidential information to Microsoft. This makes 8.1 a lot more secure than Windows 10 despite Microsoft's claims.

Some of the spyware in Windows 10 can't be disabled no matter what version of Windows you are running, even Enterprise (except at the firewall). The exception might be the special version written for the Chinese government; I believe one of their requirements was that no data was sent to Microsoft. For some reason the US government is fine with sending data to Microsoft on most of their systems (some systems are behind firewalls that block the traffic). Microsoft is one of the tech companies that works closely with the US government though, so maybe they know exactly what happens with the data.

Re:Why Windows 8.1

[yuvcifjt]

Err, no, WinXP was the best OS Microsoft ever made.
Win 7 has countless annoying usability issues - some of which are fixed by Classic Shell and 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, including usability issues with the start menu.

One of the most glaring problems is the lack of horizontal scrollbar in Windows Explorer in the folders pane. And when expanding a folder with double-click (rather than clicking "+", in the folders pane or on a pop-up folder selection box), for no reason, it spasmodically scrolls up and you can't see what just expanded!

"most secure version of Windows right now"

[Nexion]

Its called Windows Powered Off Edition. :P

Re:"most secure version of Windows right now"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's very funny, but seriously many companies are stuck on XP due to internal Microsoft apps that only work on MSIE 6. Our SharePoint prevents us from upgrading from IE 6. Also, we have a division that contracts at Microsoft on a QA/build team, and they can't upgrade from IE 6. Their internal tools only work on 6.

Re: "most secure version of Windows right now"

[TheOuterLinux]

I'm really curious if anyone has tested ReactOS for security.

Re: "most secure version of Windows right now"

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. Most of our employees contract at Microsoft so they have to run 6 on XP.

Re: "most secure version of Windows right now"

[Anonymous Coward]

So much of MSFT is limited to IE6 since many of our internal sites don't support newer.

Re: "most secure version of Windows right now"

[Anonymous Coward]

Our SharePoint doesn't support above IE 6 so we're stuck on XP.

Re: "most secure version of Windows right now"

[Anonymous Coward]

We're stuck on XP because of the Microsoft apps we use. It sucks, but less than moving to another solution.

Re:"most secure version of Windows right now"

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if the computer is physically disconnected from its power source(s).

Re: "most secure version of Windows right now"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm really curious if anyone has tested ReactOS for security.

It's absolutely secure, since the only times I've ever tried it refused to boot under any circumstances.

"If not Window$, how do we create backdoors?"

[Anonymous Coward]

, said the UK government for everything. That's why they won't use Linux. It's why any government part of the Five Eyes mostly runs archaic M$ bullshit. Compatibility versus a slight learning curve means more than security does to these people. Plus, Micro$oft makes a fortune off the contracts and licenses.

Understatement Alert

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"...a Disaster Waiting To Happen"

I think that's putting it mildly. It may well be the understatement of the century.

43 comments and no talk about proper firewall

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely Firewall off the internet
Completely Firewall off the internet
Completely Firewall off the internet
Completely Firewall off the internet
Completely Firewall off the internet
problem solved.

Re:43 comments and no talk about proper firewall

[PPH]

Completely Firewall off the internet
Completely Firewall off the internet
Completely Firewall off ...

Hey! Look at this neat USB drive I found!

Re:43 comments and no talk about proper firewall

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah nobody could ever use an infected USB drive...

Re:43 comments and no talk about proper firewall

[AHuxley]

AC "How the CIA infects air-gapped networks" (6/23/2017)
https://arstechnica.com/securi...
Shattered Assurance, Emotional Simian, Brutal Kangaroo, EZCheese, Lachesis.

Re:43 comments and no talk about proper firewall

[Antique Geekmeister]

And this great new mouse!!!

http://hackaday.com/2010/09/30...

Re:43 comments and no talk about proper firewall

[Anonymous Coward]

Those would be great band names!

nationalization of source code

[Anonymous Coward]

if only the govt had its own OS and source code, which it could distribute for free, and update based entirely on security not profit. and if only we didnt run our essential public agencies on privately owned source code from a profit driven company. gee, i wonder what can be done. Lets ask Karl Marx....

Objectively: is XP the least secure Windows?

[walterbyrd]

XP may not be getting updates, but it is not getting targeted either.

I am seeing most attacks targetting Windows 7.x - 10.x.

Back up your data, if XP is hit with malware, scrub your system and reinstall.

Windows systems newer than XP are not especially safe either.

Re:Objectively: is XP the least secure Windows?

[Antique Geekmeister]

China has hundreds of millions of XP systems still live and Internet exposed, even if only through home routers. It's still a very fertile ground for infection.

Re:Objectively: is XP the least secure Windows?

[Alioth]

XP might not be targeted by generic botnet/ransomware/etc type of attacks, but targeted attacks (e.g. an attacker who specifically wants to steal data from a British police force) will find it much easier to develop an exploit to do so from a static target that's full of security weaknesses and is not being patched.

win8.1 vs win10

[cas2000]

What's more is that the police force is upgrading its PCs from Windows XP to Windows 8.1, instead of Windows 10

given that:

a) police computers hold private information on thousands of individuals - convicts, suspects, victims, informants, witnesses, and more

and

b) Windows 10 is spyware that routinely uploads data that it finds on PCs to microsoft servers

It should be illegal for police computers (or those of any government department or any company holding personally identifiable information) to use Windows 10 to store, process, or interact with that data.

Re:win8.1 vs win10

[Anonymous Coward]

Err... the Win10 spyware was backported to Win7 and Win8. So staying on Win7/8 doesn't help much.

Re:win8.1 vs win10

[Anonymous Coward]

But at least on Windows 7/8 you have "some" degree of control over that spyware.
Windows 10? Forget it....

Re:win8.1 vs win10

[yuvcifjt]

It was only "backported" in the form of "recommended" (not "critical") telemetry updates, most of which can easily be removed.

And telemetry can be disabled by opening Task Scheduler and looking through all the schedules tasks, along with the disabling "Customer Experience Improvement Program" which is what opts the user into telemetry collection in the first place.

Re:win8.1 vs win10

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 10 "most secure version of Windows right now."

Right, it's bloody 1984 isn't....

Re:win8.1 vs win10

[Anonymous Coward]

What's more is that the police force is upgrading its PCs from Windows XP to Windows 8.1, instead of Windows 10

given that:

a) police computers hold private information on thousands of individuals - convicts, suspects, victims, informants, witnesses, and more

and

b) Windows 10 is spyware that routinely uploads data that it finds on PCs to microsoft servers

It should be illegal for police computers (or those of any government department or any company holding personally identifiable information) to use Windows 10 to store, process, or interact with that data.

What's more is that the police force is upgrading its PCs from Windows XP to Windows 8.1, instead of Windows 10

given that:

a) police computers hold private information on thousands of individuals - convicts, suspects, victims, informants, witnesses, and more

and

b) Windows 10 is spyware that routinely uploads data that it finds on PCs to microsoft servers

It should be illegal for police computers (or those of any government department or any company holding personally identifiable information) to use Windows 10 to store, process, or interact with that data.

Yes you are right bro Windows 10 is spyware that routinely uploads data that it finds on PCs to microsoft servers but people also love this
http://yourstatus.in/punjabi-status-facebook/

Big Government can't find the funds...

[Anonymous Coward]

The "if it isn't broke don't fix it" mentality.. from most of big government... tangled with having to find taxpayer dollars to remedy it.. is where we are. No matter what your vector of hope... the most likely venue is Windows 10.. but like I've seen too many times before.. there is no money to test an upgrade of the OS.. there is only money to keep the effort floating above the water.. only breathing when the waves are low.

Upgrading the infrastructure of any government.. or governmental agency isn't sexy... and therefore almost impossible to sell to the taxpayer.

Peace out.

I remember reading

[rsilvergun]

that Theresa May pulled about 18,000 police off the beat. It was one of the reasons her party got beat up in the last election. This is small potatoes compared to that. But either way it's pretty obvious the problem is a lack of funding...

Re:I remember reading

[StormReaver]

But either way it's pretty obvious the problem is a lack of funding...

And the continued use of the world's most insecure, and expensive, desktop operating system.

Re:I remember reading

[strikethree]

But either way it's pretty obvious the problem is a lack of funding...

Eh? There are PLENTY of funds. It is the distribution of those funds that are an issue.

Re:I remember reading

[Anonymous Coward]

The UK government is budgeting over seven hundred billion pounds per year.
Lack of funding?!

Datacenter licence $$$$

[Neo-Rio-101]

When a Windows Server Datacentre licence costs as much as it does, is it any wonder why governments are slow to upgrade?

Upgrading is a lot of work, regardless of OS however. Things can and do break between versions.

Real meaning

[Anonymous Coward]

... most secure version of Windows right now.

<Translate mode=real-meaning>

Microsoft needs more sales and more users to provide 'telemetry' data.

ahh but

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh but,when you see the record of the UK government and its branches over the last two decades of large I.t projects,it's probably cheaper and safer to keep them using xp and pay ms for support.
Look at the wonderful schemes they have had for the nhs I.t systems and then look at the huge amount of money spent so far for systems that have totally failed.
Look at how well the BBC did at rolling out their wonderful system,£200m,wasted,no working system,idea scrapped..
Most of the uk's public I.t plans have been shite and have just led to huge incomes for so called I.t consultants and hardware suppliers,while leaving users with non-working new systems or still using the old systems that were meant to be retired years ago.
And a lot of the reason is meant to be efficiency,but they have delivered the opposite..

So, key escrow still on the cards?

[oddware]

Trust us with your key escrow, we will keep it in the safest system... we swear.....
Seriously, how on earth can they be trusted with key escrow when they cannot keep their systems safe

Why mainframe lives

[Tablizer]

This is why mainframe software lives: applications that ran in 1966 still mostly work as-is. Pretty, no, but the lack of a rework bill *is* pretty.

Thereâ(TM)s Been a Solution for Years Now

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X. Youâ(TM)d have to be retarded to expect security from a Windows based device considering the popularity of the OS.

This Just In

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows is a disaster. As is texting using the new iOS keyboard.

And soon enough, given microsoft update policy...

[Z80a]

"London Metropolitan Police's 18,000 Windows 10 PCs Is a Disaster In Progress "

Waste in the public sector

[Anonymous Coward]

It is infuriating that government wastes money on commercial softwre at all. It simply isn't good value for the taxpayer. For an organisation the size of the London police force, they have sufficient power to ensure that Linux or UNIX versions of any important bespoke software get deployed. UNIX and derivatives are definitely a more cost effective option, and have a smaller attack surface than Microsoft's expensive offering. There is also the advantage that UNIX admins are usually much more competent than the 'click until it works' admins who seem to be prevalent in the windows world, and in my experience, you only need half the number for the same size of organisational unit.

Surely Microsoft can fix this?

[EzInKy]

All it would take is a providing a few fixes for an OS they heralded as the best less than a decade ago.

Re:Surely Microsoft can fix this?

[najajomo]

"All it would take is a providing a few fixes for an OS they heralded as the best less than a decade ago."

HA .. ROTFLMHO ...

The solution

[paai]

The solution is perhaps rather expensive, but obvious: do not allow any operating system to have more than, e.g. 33% share in any essential sector of society. So that if any OS is overwhelmed by an attack, 66% of the capacity remains unaffected.

Paai

Conflict of interest

[Futurepower(R)]

Microsoft Windows XP "end of life": Conflict of interest.

ramonware is a threat inherent to a big city

[Anonymous Coward]

they just have to get used to it

right?

plus, the police dont need computers when theres muslims gangs going around raping your children anyway

Cuts, cuts, cuts

[w-wright]

It turns out that the last Labour Government did have a licensing deal with Microsoft that would allow them to have a migration plan to newer versions of Microsoft Software. In 2010, the Conservatives cancelled the deal and returned licensing responsibility to local NHS trusts. This added to local IT Budgets which made it harder for them to provide support and this is where we are today! Source: Private Eye, No 1444.

Don't expect it to get better

[Anonymous Coward]

They have the usual sharks, including DXC (the trainwreck merger of CSC and HPE), running their IT. DXC are more interested in cutting the UK operation to way under the bare minimum than actually providing a service.

It used to be that govt. contracts were massive and went to a single vendor. They got burned by that so they now split up server support, networks, desktop, apps into separate contracts. Net result? Nothing works because the vendors can spend the entire time finger pointing at each other.

Just proves how broke everyone is

[JohnScott1514]

You can make arguments for keeping old outdated operating systems and software around. But the end reason is lack of funds to put forth a real upgrade plan. Nobody seems to have a plan to move past a certain point. It like they are locked in the past, unable to invest in the future. If the London police only upgrade to Win 8.1 it means buying only a couple years until another crisis in expired support happens. Unfortunately the advances in operating systems seems to present problems as well as solutions to those who operate them in government and business.

It's not called Windows XP anymore.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's generally referred to as "Windows Embedded Standard 2009".

WES2009 still has full support from Microsoft. They've even got a version you can install on a desktop computer called WES2009 POSReady. It's kinda designed for point of sale terminals, but it's as close to Windows XP SP4 as you're ever gonna get. It still receives security updates regularly.

WES2009 (the actual version built on Windows XP Embedded) is a highly componentized version of XP. Microsoft abandoned this workflow for building embedded images with Windows 7 Embedded, which kinda forces you to use a fairly full fledged OS even if you don't want to. Lots of people stick to WES2009/XP Embedded because of this, it's a reasonable 32-bit platform that you can strip down to sub-64MB if you really want to.

Special pleading

[Anonymous Coward]

The UK state sector have a well worn strategy where they don't listen or do any work and let things build up to the point of crisis atwhich point they stick their hand out and scream for more money. None of this has anything to do with outcomes such as improving services for the public but a way to fund headcount and shiny headquarters.

I have indepedent verified information which implicates a large UK state sector organisation in corporate manslaughter and the cops don't want to hear. the cops also dodged out of my offering an inetrview at the local police station when I turned the Police and Criminal Evidence Act on them and insisted the meeting was video recorded under interview conditions. A member of the polcie force unconnected with this decided to interfere and scotch the meeting citing a wholly irrelevant policy and the polcie station failed to respond to my complaint of this off the record interference within 72 hours as they are supposed to. The police also failed to respond to my complaining they failed to respond within 72 hours.

imho, updating police computers is much like everything else. They will fuck up or do nothing in a more expensive and faster way leavign mroe time for gazing out the window.

And yes. I am prepared to testify in a public court of law. Let's see how fast UK state sector nosey parkers race to report this. Like, never. lol

Why

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do they not upgrade? Well it is most likey down to costs of licenses, where one now has to think is it worth it? If Win10 is the last OS Microsoft will ever do (until they change their mind again) the Win10 is the best way to go with constant updates ONLY is they have the money to cover these upgrades. Perhaps they should look at using Linux but I am not sure how Linux goes about with updating the kernal on an automatic basis (As I don't use linux)

XP has its uses

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got documentation written in Windows Help that can't be converted. Won't even run under Windows 10 compatibility mode. I have to maintain an XP machine to run it. It's very possible that the govt has some custom software written for XP that won't run in newer versions, they make systems in house and also contract custom software for things. The approval process is arduous as well. They have to make those approved programs last.

Linux Makes Sense, but will never happen

[rbrander]

When Linux first started to produce viable desktop products, the argument was the same as for Macs: we need to run just one O/S, and many of our users need Windows applications, so that's that, we all have to run Windows.

But then IT themselves pushed every major software project towards web solutions, because they didn't want to install any .EXE files at all - they never really got over their beloved mainframe environment, you see; they wanted all the PCs to go back to being dumb terminals and leave them in control. Cheaper and much, much easier on their nerves.

But we STILL had to buy Windows, because all the Web applications ran on IE. When we asked one vendor in 2004 if their program ran OK on Firefox and so forth as well, they blinked in surprise and said it had never occurred to them to test.

Then around 2010, more and more web applications would NOT run on IE, and best on Chrome, and they reluctantly allowed that install.

But a Linux conversion will STILL never happen, even though there is now no sane excuse at all. Because all of these changes had one central source: IT always does the easiest thing.

1) Always stay with existing solutions unless there's a gun to your head
2) Always buy a new solution from the largest, most monopolistic company you can find: IBM over Amdahl, Microsoft over Apple, Google over anybody.
3) Never do anything that a herd has not done first.

You could sell a government IT office on a solution that GM and Boeing and Prudential had tried first, I suppose. But don't look to government for IT pioneering.

Re:I'll just leave these random questions lying he

[LinuxIsGarbage]

POSReady: 2019-04-09
Windows 7: 2020-01-14
8.1 Pro: 2023-01-10

That's Security patches only. Hardware support for XP was dropped quite a while ago, and application support is falling off rapidly. Even with Windows 7 hardware support is dropping off.

Hardware support is a bigger issue from a practical point of view. If hardware (via PCI interface, etc) requires XP, the rest of the system must be able to run XP. If it is just an application that only needs (firewalled) network support, or USB support, or Serial support, it can be run in a VM on a modern hardware.

Nope..

[LesserWeevil]

Nope, the disaster has already occurred. ;-|

I've seen worse

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked for a gov't agency back in the day and came a time when they finally acknowledged they needed to upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP.

The management approved a plan where all the older desktops that couldn't support XP would have their memory and hard drives upgrade. The average cost for doing this was $350 per machine.

I pointed out that I had a quote in hand from Dell (at the time our approved supplier) for a mass batch of machines for $420 each that were orders of magnitude better than the result of upgrading the existing machines AND wouldn't require all that labor for upgrading and demonstrated how that $70 of extra cost was more than accounted for. I mean I had the labor expenses and everything laid out for them.

It came down to them saying "constituents don't care if it costs us more in the long term to upgrade the old machines, all they care about is when the newspaper headlines DHSS BLOWS $5 MILLION ON NEW COMPUTERS"

I do tech support for a law enforcement network

[ratstick]

And there is no uniformity. Our network PCs range from Windows 7, Windows 8, to Windows 10. The only uniformity comes with our remote network sessions and even those are pretty rough. And don't even get me started on Windows 10 and their automatic updates screwing up our security verification system. That's government inefficiency for you, though.

What is even more dumb than this?

[ebvwfbw]

Great Britain's newest, largest, ...best, wonderful... new aircraft carrier, it runs XP
While The QE is a big ship, it only carries half the aircraft of the Gerald Ford.

Even though it's not the big boy on the block, this is one big, very capable ship. A lot to be proud of. So what do they run on the computers running the ship? Windows XP? Are they out of their gourd?

http://www.popularmechanics.co...

Can't make this stuff up. I see that they claim this is only temporary. However once it's in, it's often really tough to get rid of it.

Can dish it out, but ...

[dbIII]

You are the one that called my comment into question and attempted to "correct" the truth with guesswork so why complain and pretend to act so wounded?
I didn't attack you just your uninformed "correction" based on gut feeling instead of any of the many news articles, many in the international press, about May's drastic cuts to the police since 2010.