This part gave me a chill:
The Royal Navy’s decision to save money by using Windows for Submarines, a version of Windows XP, as the operating system for its ballistic-missile subs seems especially shortsighted.
Indeed!
The Royal Navy’s decision to save money by using Windows for Submarines, a version of Windows XP, as the operating system for its ballistic-missile subs seems especially shortsighted.
Indeed!
Anyway, defence stuff takes ages to develop, test and go through "trials", so it's quite common the customer gets stuff seven or eight years after development started.
In particular, the Astute sub development programme was started in 1997, the first one was laid down in 2001, and was with the RN in 2010, although there were four years of programme delay (as there nearly always is with defence programmes).
It is shocking to think that my home computer is probably running a newer version of Windows than the U.K.’s military submarines
It is shocking to think that a military submarine is running any version of Windows.
An air-gapped hardened Windows XP with all the optional services turned off is pretty robust.