Weird News - Things that make you go 'hmmm'

834 readers

58 users here now

Rules:

News must be from a reliable source. No tabloids or sensationalism, please.
Try to keep it safe for work. Contact a moderator before posting if you have any doubts.
Titles of articles must remain unchanged; however extraneous information like "Watch:" or "Look:" can be removed. Titles with trailing, non-relevant information can also be edited so long as the headline's intent remains intact.
Be nice. If you've got nothing positive to say, don't say it.

Violators will be banned at mod's discretion.

Communities We Like:

-Not the Onion

-And finally...

founded 8 months ago

MODERATORS

lemmyfanadmin

oleorun

343

A Windows XP machine's life expectancy in 2024 seems to be about 10 minutes before even just an idle net connection renders it a trojan-riddled zombie PC (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 5 months ago by oleorun to c/weirdnews

56 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Just a fun, somewhat terrifying read

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 52 points 5 months ago (3 children)

And yet XP is still running god knows how many major company systems (air gapped of course, but still).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Oh yea, I was consulting in a factory recently and one production line was running off of Finnish windows XP with no service packs because the software for the machines doesn't support anything else.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Didn't someone implement a virus at some point that propagated through sound from speakers to microphones?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

That was a way to offload information from an air gapped system. It already has to be compromised to work

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

IIRC that was not proven and the researcher who made that claim had some mental illness? Idk

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

To be fair, if we discredited research from individuals with mental illness half of our research would be gone.

But yeah, it was mostly a proof of concept of someone happened to plug a bad USB into an air gapped machine with a mic and speakers

[–] [email protected] 63 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I would expect there to be problems with most machines if they were to be fully exposed to the internet, nobody actually uses a computer like this