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News, opinion, advice and research: Chet and Duck (Chester Wisniewski and Paul Ducklin) bring you their unique and entertaining combination of all four in their regular quarter-hour programme.
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(27 August 2013, duration 16’06”, size 9.7MB)
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Stories covered in Chet Chat #115
- Microsoft predicts bleak future for XP users after patches run out.
- Anatomy of a brute force attack – how important is password complexity?
- LastPass password manager gets security patch against password leakage bug.
- Next version of the web will have resistance to surveillance at its core.
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XP has been an incredibly stable, dependable, and useful operating system for me since it was introduced. I have Windows 7 on a new computer, and it seems pretty good, too, but I prefer XP through familiarity with it. I will be sorry to see it go. I do not understand Microsoft's insistence on killing it. Let Microsoft kill everything else except for XP, 7 and 8, which seems rather buggy but I guess is needed for tablets. Why kill XP? I'm not sure my laptop that runs XP can be upgraded to Windows 7.
XP at this point requires enormous resources to continue to patch, in order to keep it safe to use. When support officially ends, Microsoft will simply no longer patch it, and it will become increasingly unsafe to use. This is not complicated. There is no financial incentive for Microsoft to continue to patch XP at this point, only costs and a diversion of resources from current and future products. Win 7 is very good. Win 8–arguments about the don't-call-me-Metro UI aside–is even faster and more stable than Win 7. Vista was a very new OS in many ways, the whole device driver model is different, and on and on. The costs go well beyond just Microsoft. It costs vendors of other software products an enormous amount to continue trying to support Win XP with their new products, and in more and more cases new software simply wouldn't work on XP, anyway. Hardware manufacturers incur significant additional costs writing entirely different drivers for their devices for Windows XP, and so on.
Do you wish they were still supporting Windows for Workgroups 3.11?
It is time to move on, and no, it isn't a Microsoft conspiracy to make your life suck.