Just been reading the Fitzgerald piece Hols2 posted - Sweet baby Jesus! A cluster**** of biblical proportions. The true blame looks like it lies firmly with the US Naval command structure, that can allow a ship to operate at sea under such conditions, and which makes such a set of circumstances pretty much inevitable.
A navigation system running Windows 2000, for Chrissakes! Probably loaded from floppy disk, ‘for security purposes‘.
A navigation system running Windows 2000, for Chrissakes!
You'd be outraged if you knew what they were sending folk into space off.....
You’d be outraged if you knew what they were sending folk into space off….
Well, considering NASA used computers little better than a tarty abacus, with launch systems that were, pretty much ‘light blue touch paper, stand well back’...
I do know how primitive the systems were up until Apollo, however, a supposedly modern fleet warship, on active service, running software that isn’t even supported by the manufacturer is criminal. It was bad enough having to use Vista a few years ago!
I’ve just checked, Microsoft withdrew all support for 2000 and XP in July 2010...
Nearly a bloody decade ago! More security holes than a colander full of Swiss cheese.
You’d be surprised how much bespoke hardware operates on obsolete software.
Microsoft support is irrelevant as are security holes when it’s connected to an isolated system. Software applications will be designed to run on the OS and the hardware which underpins it. Problems arise when the computer which supports the application dies and a replacement cannot be sourced. The application will almost certainly not run on newer OS and emulators are not stable.
Sadly not just limited to the US. The following piece is from 2008 ...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/jun/04/military.defence
Nearly a bloody decade ago! More security holes than a colander full of Swiss cheese
Hard to get to though and more importantly all the relevant bugs have been worked out.
If it doesnt have external access then an older system is often better than finding all the new bugs.
It was less than 10 years ago that some ATM's were working on DOS. They may still be, I don't know.
As above, the OS is stable and in an isolated environment is not vulnerable to many of the modern security issues.
