UK.gov confirms it's binned extended Windows XP support

Appropriate picture

Old and dirty, fraying at the edges, in use beyond its reasonable lifetime expectation. But hey, it still does its basic job if you're prepared to put up with it and you don't have the time or budget to replace it.

What next ?

Ask the French Police to show them the way, that's what should be next.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/01/french-national-police

Security in our time

"We expect most remaining government devices using Windows XP will be able to mitigate any risks"

I can just see a government minister standing on the lawn outside parliament, looking direct to camera.

"There will be no security breach, we've analysed the risk, and I have in my hand a piece of paper...."

Translation:

"We're desperately broke because the government is committed to impossible spending cuts, so we just revoked everyone's IT support budget for all cases where the budget isn't being used to support a white elephant project run by a close friend or relation of a cabinet minister."

Perhaps they ran the same as a lot of us.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\PosReady]

"Installed"=dword:00000001

Works for me

"We expect most remaining government devices using Windows XP will be able to mitigate [b]any[/b] risks,"

Am I the only person who is really, REALLY suspicious of the word "Any" in there? It's almost as though we have some administrative managerial drone spouting forth without actually doing the research to understand what those risks might be - thereby elevating his/her confidence to the point where they might even speak of "THE risks"...

For heavens sake, you're responsible for holding masses of masses of our most sensitive information, and you are subject to the DPA. Running a maintained operating system on your kit really should not be that much of an ask...

Will the government compensate us when we all get powned by this one?

...are still to finish XP migration projects.

That leaves quite a lot of room for interpretation. Does that mean

1) We've migrated 99.9% of systems but still have some key systems running ancient software with OS dependencies that we need to pay contractors to fix. But we've moved them to internal only and put up our best firewalls to protect them.

2) We've haven't gotten off our butts and started yet because the waste hasn't hit the oscillating air mover yet.

3) Something in between.

Two Targets!!!!

I wonder if MOD or GHCQ have completed their switch? What LOVELY targets ;)

We still have quite a few XP machines left in our engineering manufacturing company.

They are on things like a specialist label printer, an EPROM/FLASH programmer, sign cutter and freight company weighing machine. None have Internet access, most don't have any form of web browser. Most will be stuck at XP for ever as either need ISA bus for a controller card, old XP only SCSI card and software that just doesn't work under Vista/Win7/8.

Most just work fine, type in numbers & letters into label printer software, press go...out come nice printed labels to label products. Under Win7 the software fails to allow open/save/file actions, so fail there. Later software version is available at £xxx works with Win7 but doesn't support a parallel port printer so would involve purchase later version of printer at £xxxx. Why change it still just works,

Want freight label, place box on scales, press button, nice freight label printed. Done.

So this is why so many companies are still using XP in all types of places as it just works and has worked for years.

UK govt. can buy Windows 10 with enterprise licence where they can hold feature updates for many years. Though Windows 10 is almost a spyware(less than Android of course) but UK govt. probably have nothing to fear as they are like in bed partner relationship with USA since many years.