Hacker News Reader

Comment by luke-stanley | Hacker News Reader

In 2018 I saw a local branch office were using Windows XP and an old Internet Explorer. You cannot expect that to be secure. This does not surprise me at all.

View on HN

A lot of those are actually pirated/modified installs of Windows. I think its called Tomato Windows or something like that? I forget, but its incredibly prevalent in China.

XP is very common on airports in China too.

it's in US ones too, it's an industry wide issue in the aviation sector, don't hack the airport, people will come for you and if you are lucky they will be carrying badges

Whatever happened with the Gatwick drone?

Surprise, it's 2022, and XP is still a de-facto standard Windows version, with hacked Win7 slowly gaining.

Why? Tons of Software was written for XP, and then abandoned without any support. Many of that stuff in the government sector. A lot of online banking clients outright say "only works on XP," and copyright years reads 2006.

This is similar how Android 7+ support was almost nuked in China for nearly a year because Tencent didn't want to port Wechat to newer APIs cuz "nobody uses Android newer than 4.X in China"

That was not why they refused to port it to newer APIs though. It was because Google changed the permissions API to be more granular and request permissions at runtime, which would have meant Tencent would have to request tons of permissions to gather user data (presumably users would not be inclined to grant so many permissions).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com