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WinXP is officially dead!
xtabber:
Microsoft has basically adopted the ransomware model widely used by criminal hacking groups and increasingly popular with some allegedly legitimate cloud storage firms.
Microsoft will continue to provide support for governments and large institutions willing to pay huge sums to keep large numbers of XP systems safe for the next few years.
So Microsoft will continue to write the necessary patches and provide them to those who can afford to pay their extortion, but it will not provide them to the rest of us, even though it would cost them next to nothing to make them available for download by everyone.
That doing so endangers everyone on the Internet matters not one whit to them.
wraith808:
So... how long do they support a 12 year old operating system? Does it matter that they don't support windows 95 anymore? Or Windows ME? Or... god forbid, Windows for Workgroups 3.11?
Carol Haynes:
Microsoft has basically adopted the ransomware model widely used by criminal hacking groups and increasingly popular with some allegedly legitimate cloud storage firms.
Microsoft will continue to provide support for governments and large institutions willing to pay huge sums to keep large numbers of XP systems safe for the next few years.
So Microsoft will continue to write the necessary patches and provide them to those who can afford to pay their extortion, but it will not provide them to the rest of us, even though it would cost them next to nothing to make them available for download by everyone.
That doing so endangers everyone on the Internet matters not one whit to them.
-xtabber (April 08, 2014, 03:11 PM)
--- End quote ---
:Thmbsup: :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup:
I have had a number of phones calls today from worried customers when they got the "scareware" = "extortion" pop up on their screen.
MS have effectively infected their XP systems with malware deliberately!!
Does anyone know if there is an easy way to turn it off? I found two scheduled processes to keep the popup going but deleting those processes doesn't stop the popup - I suspect the dregs of Windows Update (from now on I'll call it Windows Infect on XP systems). Does turning off Windows update stop them?
Personally I think many people may be better off without MS updates - they often caused more grief than they cured!
My approach to customers is make sure you have a good AV running and buy a copy of Malwarebytes Antimalware and install it to run in the background all the time. Download Google Chrome or Firefox and never use IE.
This was all good advice in the past anyway so nothing has really changed.
The question that doesn't have a clear answer is will MS be bribing vendors to remove driver support and software support (esp. AV) for XP ? Or are security suites in to make a killing?
40hz:
Microsoft has basically adopted the ransomware model widely used by criminal hacking groups and increasingly popular with some allegedly legitimate cloud storage firms.
Microsoft will continue to provide support for governments and large institutions willing to pay huge sums to keep large numbers of XP systems safe for the next few years.
-xtabber (April 08, 2014, 03:11 PM)
--- End quote ---
It may really more like:
Microsoft will continue to provide support for governments and large institutions to keep large numbers of XP systems safe from being reformatted and having Linux installed on them for the next few years until it gets its head out of its butt and makes Windows 8 look and work just like Windows 7 does.
app103:
Now here is something interesting that maybe those that plan on sticking with XP should know:
Microsoft will produce Windows XP updates for much longer than April 2014. The last official updates for Windows 2000 were released last year, 3 years after EOL, and were distributed inside the monthly security ISO update packages. Apart from that, a few more non-public official updates were leaked.
In case of Windows XP I'd expect at least regular official updates until July 2015 (when Windows 2003 is becoming EOL). After April you should definitely check the monthly ISOs available under this link:
Security updates are available on ISO-9660 DVD5 image files from the Microsoft Download Center
Just keep in mind that Microsoft will not mention the existence of those updates in their official news channels. As in case of Windows 2000, the updates can be found inside those ISO packages even though Windows 2000's name itself isn't listed there at all.
More than that, due to the fact that Windows XP is much more popular than Windows 2000, I'm 99% sure that a lot of non-public updates will be leaked as well.
--- End quote ---
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/157597-win-xp-past-apr-2014-was-will-xp-be-supported-until-2019/page-4#entry1069185
There are some other interesting things in that thread, as well, such as the idea of adapting updates to Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 (based on XP, which will still receive extended support till April 2019) for use in regular XP.
Keep in mind that there are still people out there running 98/ME/2k and their world hasn't melted down, yet, and in many cases they have been able to get the latest security patches through other means, hacked to work with their outdated OSs. There will be nothing to stop XP users from joining them and waiting for the patches for currently supported versions of Windows to be ripped apart and tested to see what can be put together for them, and the bunch of 98/ME/2k users that are still sticking with their old faithful OS. XP users are actually in a better position than the 9x users, since even the latest supported versions are NT based, just like XP, making it much easier to hack a patch for it.
And if you want to see what the future of XP holds, ask the 2k users that didn't upgrade, what their main issues are:
1) trying to run an older OS on newer hardware and trying to find drivers that work, or
2) trying to run newer software on the older OS, or
3) being restricted to older browsers which do not support newer features so accessing things like Flash or YouTube no longer work.
They are not crying about security problems. #2 & #3 were my main issues with running WinME, back in 2008, and would most likely still be my main issues if I were to take that PC out of retirement, with an entirely different issue not even on that list, if I were to try to get it online via anything but dialup. (same issue I had back in 2008, having to replace a combo modem & soundcard with both a NIC & soundcard via a bridge board soldered into an ISA slot, for which the PCI slots on it are disabled at the hardware level, by the manufacturer, leaving only 1 working ISA slot on the board to work with. If I could get past that, I'd likely then have to deal with issue #1)
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