The elevator was running Windows XP.
Clearly a extreme case of overengineering. A elevator has no business running more than a few microcontrollers.
It’s probably only the screen component that is running an old version of embedded windows.
Screen? In a elevator?
Yes? That is not that unusual and it is mentioned in the third sentence of the article.
As I rode up to the 14th floor, my eyes were drawn to a screen built into the side of the lift.
Those screens can easily run on an integrated Raspberry Pi microcontroller, they dont exactly have complex graphics
We are far away from the release of the Raspberry Pi if that screen is running an early version of Windows CE. Putting a PC in the elevator to drive the screen was probably the most cost effective solution.
Was but theres no reason to keep doing that
There’s not particularly good reason to stop doing it in that scenario either.
You have an offline technology stack in that elevator that has been doing the job correctly for 20 years. Why take on the expense and risk of changing things that aren’t currently broken?
It would be crazy if you are building new to resort to that stack, but for an established elevator, why bother?
Same for some old oscilloscopes at work. I’m not crazy about the choice but I can hardly suggest it would be practical to change it while the oscilloscopes still do their function.
I would say it’s a problem if the stack is online, but if it is self contained, the age of the software doesn’t make it a problem in and out itself.
New ones probably use something newer. The 20 year old elevator in a hospital will only be upgraded if something breaks.
RPi is not a microcontroller.
How else are you gonna show ads?
I hate that you are right.
That’s what I think too. And then I see “Their systems are built into everything around us”, which basically only applies to PCs and laptops. What is built into pretty much everything around us is GnuLinux.
Not even GNU - just Linux.
Yeah yeah, something something GNU/Linux blah blah copypasta…
What is built into pretty much everything around us is GnuLinux.
Many things, but far from that.
Qube cinema servers only got off XP in 2015. They’re still on 7 though.
But how else can it be safe to connect to the internet?
You need to be on-site to fix it anyway, just access the debug port.
But how else can it book requests for priority access, and verify the credit card for whoever booked the elevator?
If it serves your needs then more power to them. Tech companies today more than ever make sure you keep buying.
Good for them. If it works, it works. I wouldn’t connect it to the internet though.
If not for DX10 and above not even existing on it, afaik, I’d still be using XP. That was the best iteration until they forcibly made you have to upgrade if you played games (especially if you wanted to play Halo on PC).
especially if you wanted to play Halo on PC
I still giggle that after years and years of Halo 3+ being a console exclusive, and Halo 2 sucking on Windows for years*, the entire Halo collection now has a Gold rating on Linux. I have very specific memories of being annoyed for years that the most prestigious Microsoft game doesn’t work on a Microsoft gaming platform (Windows).
*God damn does Games for Windows Live suck
I would bet there are still a few old pieces of industrial machinery around that I duct taped together by imaging an ancient PC and transferring it to a Virtual Box VM.
There are many, many machines out there running 95 and even earlier versions. The issue is that a machine from 30 years ago is almost always still using the software that came with the machine… 30 years ago.
Even if the OS has received security patches, which isn’t even assured, the company may either no longer be in business, or charge for new OS drivers/specialized software.
In many cases, your options are literally to replace an entire machine worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or deal with the networking nightmare that is “keep this on the network, but not on the network.”
I 4 years ago I remotely reinstalled Wonderware and necessary drivers on a Windows NT3.51 HMI controlling a mango line in Africa (I don’t remember exactly, maybe Burkina?). Not fun, there wasn’t much documentation left.
One year later I had to do it again.I use a Windows XP machine for work nearly every day. And yeah, it’s because it runs some of the most expensive equipment in the company.
BART wrote a PDP8 cross assembler in the late 90s, that they still use today.
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/plucky/man1/palbart.1.html
Nuclear silos… is that early dos system I believe?
As long as things are not connected and not trying to add newer stuff , what’s the problem?
Stuck? What can you do that I can’t on Windows 7?
Read an article, apparently - it explains why the old systems are still in use.
People keep saying to keep these XP machines off the internet. I seriously doubt there’s much threat, especially for even older OS’s like 98 and 95. It’s the very devil just trying to browse with them, nothing much out there is going to be able to attack them. Security through obscurity indeed!
In any case, we’re no longer in the Wild West days when people had machines hooked directly to the internet and a firewall was a third-party addon. LOL, ZoneAlarm anyone!
We all have a basic firewall built into our routers so unless you deliberately expose services you’re fairly bulletproof to scanners. I remember scanning for Win2000 machines in blocks of IPs, long after it was defunct. Plenty were out there!
You are forgetting targeted attacks. A blind attack would pretty much not have much of an effect indeed, however if the attacker knows the machine, then it’s easy for the attackers to exploit these vulnerability if left “out in the open”, and cause havoc, possibly create a lot of damages or leech informations pumped into those machines via old Windows installations.
For a business sure.
You wanna hack my dnd campaign and some pictures of my cock? Sure whatever dude. All financial and important shit goes through my phone anyway and that’s likely to be hacked from the institutions I use.
They’ll infect it and make it part of their DDoS bot swarm.
While that is awful and sucks. Again, probably won’t really target me
If China or America use my machine as a member of their DDoS bot swarm likely I probably couldn’t even fight back as much as I’d like. Either one of those countries could have backdoor bullshit into any system you think of.
If it is a nefarious third party maybe I want them to use my computer to attack the financial system of these capitalist regimes or to harm the infrastructure of an oppressive government.
Again, have my cock and dnd campaign. If my system runs slow and annoys me guess I’ll deal with it. They already will get my information from the millions of sources compiling and collecting it.
I dunno doesn’t really make me shake in my boots
This is short-sighted. It also reeks of “Fuck you, I got mine!” I know that’s not your intention. I just think you haven’t thought super hard about it. I was the same with privacy concerns.
So let me throw some edge cases at you.
You remember the network time protocol vulnerability that was used to power botnets for a little bit? Well, until everyone upgraded their shit, service providers had to just block IP ranges of compromised machines until enough machines in that block stopped DDoS’ing them.
So what happens when some script kiddy pays for time on the botnet, which includes your box, to smash Wizards while you’re trying to look things up? Or what if someone uses your box as a jump box to go attack some giant corporation, and shit gets traced back to you? Or what if someone decides you’re the unlucky one where their whole goal is to dominate your entire home network, and they get your phone when it’s on your home wifi?
I would still be using Windows 7 if it was safe to connect to the internet.
I can’t believe government systems are just open to cyber security like that.
Are there not cyber terrorists for some teenager that has tried to do anything with these unsecured systems?
Why would Windows 7 not be “safe” to connect to the internet? Do you understand how any of this works?
Lemmy is overloaded with people that puff up and want to present like they know things about tech, when they know basically nothing.
Get a hardware firewall, get basic safe practices in place, don’t do basic user operations as admin, and configure shit correctly. If you think that your OS is there to protect you, you are a tech foooooooooooooool
Windows 7 is not safe because windows does not support it with security anymore, and i dont know what i am doing when it comes to security.
Yes, obviously if you know how to add better security, or more importantly, know what you need, then yeah it is fine to use. But it is not safe ‘out of the box’.
I left reddit because I wanted to escape people who were just looking to create arguments. But I guess there is still people like that here on lemmy.
I just connected my Windows 7 machine to the internet and two Russians jumped out my serial port! One is holding me down while the other one is stealing the CPU from my washing machine! Send help!
I hope they aren’t the hackers known as 4chan!
Well one did fuck me in the ass while the other one stole my favorite underwear right out from the delicate cycle. Total animals.
No, and that is saddly the standard these days. Its all just bullshit sales tatics and a weird take on what risks are and are not involved with legacy tech.
Like dude how am I supposed to order burgers through skip the dishes if I don’t have Windows 11 and a 64 core CPU with 256GB of DDR18 super RAM running terabytes of vibe-coded AI slop!???
Just slap some bit defender on it. That’s all that we have to do with windows 10 and we’re all good to go. Hey if Linux can run on the same box for all these years and be safe theres no reason why any windows system can’t be safe with a simple add on.
Windows 11 is just a tmp chip added to board
Srsly that is all. Something smaller than a thumb drive changed and they are trying to convince the world to make more waste. It’s fucking stupid. Microsoft can eat fat ass.
I was tearing out ancient infrastructure for a new office and my eye kept going to a rectangular square box on the wall. Finally realized it was a PC! The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat. It was a form factor I had never seen, but standard nonetheless. It was running an answering machine system in DOS, still worked! Such a rare machine I’ve only found a single reference on the web and a single video about it. 1999, 486XS (I know, would kill for a DX, it’s soldered on), upgraded from 2x 2MB SIMMs to a whopping 2x 64MB SIMMs. Imagine what that would have cost in the day!
LONG story, but I got it running Windows 95b. 3.1 was just too much challenge to get it networked and happy. Much pain was removed when I got a USB floppy emulator. Can’t do jack without a floppy! Broke the network card drivers, need to start over. Had it running Doom with a legit SoundBlaster card and could RDP into over the network.
It was an amazing journey getting it all together and updated. Most of that knowledge is gone from the internet, and I sure don’t remember all the tricks. Going to be my first token ring machine! LOL, had to get parts from Romania and trash cans.
The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat.
PSU: “Release…me…from this mockery called life”
If you ever see yourself in the need of information about the DOS era again, Vogons is the place to go IMHO.
But it’s all in poetry, unfortunately.
I binge people doing this type of thing on YouTube lol. I miss working in the industry
Some might be surprised how many systems are still running on AS400s. IBM still makes and maintains IBMi, the modern iteration. My last company wrote our flagship product for these machines, all green screen. Our customers would sometimes move to our GUI product and jump right back to the prompt menus. Hey, if you gotta move fast and have a bulletproof system, text menus are the only way to fly!
By my god, the skill set for running and programming those beasts touches on almost nothing I’ve learned in 30+ years of IT work. Wish I had got experience in that part of the company, seen some solid job posts for that sorta tech.
I worked in the airline industry for years and learned a GUI overlay for one system and another entirely green screen system called SHARES (see if you can guess the airline). Honestly I kind of enjoyed working with those systems; there’s some refreshing “back to basics” feeling kind of like driving a manual transmission.
In my current job I’ve been using another legacy system. Well, my job was to create a relatively modern service for the legacy system to call, but none of the remaining developers knew how to use the extensions of that system that does SOAP calls. So I had to learn just enough of that legacy system to hold their hands through the parts that call my service. Kind of fun, to be honest!
SOAP calls
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
Almost all of Germanys internal healthcare communications does use that.
I worked with an AS400 while in vehicle logistics, those things are optimized for simple functions but high data throughput
I run a computer on Win7 at work, because it needs some important legacy software. It can’t be containered because it has a nasty licence manager.
And my oscilloscope runs on Win98.
I would totally hang with that lady in the thumbnail lol
Depends if the photo was taken recently or at the time W95 was around…
My wife still using windows 2000 on her laptop. Still boots and runs. She just doesn’t connect it to the internet.
Ancient industrial machines use ancient windows computers. This has been known forever. There’s a whole niche industry of very expensive ram and hard drives and other components keeping this machines going
Yeah man. Details are going to be fuzzy here, but I think it was only in recent memory where Boeing upgraded the planes in Japan to no longer need floppy disks.
Yes i still use floppy disks regularly for my cnc plasma table
I’d still be using Windows 7 if I could.
I mean, you can if you want to
It’s not safe and all that stuff.
Why do people keep repeating this tired propaganda? What exactly do you think will happen?
No1 rule in IT security: Keep shit updated.
Now I haven’t used windows other than managed work stuff for a decade but I would assume that the problem with the already existing nightmare of windows would be a lot worse if completely void of bugfixes.
But if you have an insight in to an entire field of experts on the subject I’m very keen on hearing it.
Very simple: I’m one user.
Do explain. How is that relevant to not getting bugfixes for your OS?
Where did I say not to get bugfixes for my OS, which is Windows 7?
