No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
The XP device is a major security risk because its got known security vulnerabilities that are not patched and actively targetted. Its targetted because hackefs know there are bad businesses and users still running xp.
The issue is less your firewall and instead your whole network. If XP has internet access and is on your home network, it gives hackers and malware a route through to your other devices.
If you want to connect XP to the internet then there are two realistic options.
One is give the XP machine its own isolated network alongside your home network - a VLAN (virtual local area network) - i.e. a second physical network if your router supports it. One easy way of doing that is to see if your router has a Guest Wifi set up, and if so ensure that is configured to be entirely separate from your main network. But this is still risky because if you dont know what youre doing you could accidentally leave your network exposed. Also if you already use the guest network - for guests for example - then you'll put those devices at risk, and should make a whole dedocated vlan instead.
The other option is get a second router, create a wifi with that (or ethernet connection ideally) and connect that router to the internet via an always on VPN (virtual private network). The second router and network would completely physically isolates the XP machine from your home network, even though it needs to connect through your first router to reach fhe internet. The VPN is key there, but if you dont want to use a VPN you could also isolate the second in a VLAN on your main router. This is similar to option one but would allow a totally separate dedicated wifi connection without losing your guest wifi or compromising your home wifi.
The XP machine itself will always be vulnerable whatever you do. Obviously configure a firewall and antivirus on it, and be safe in how you use it, to minimize the risk.
Whatever you do, do not connect rhe XP machine directly to your home network if you're giving it access out onto the internet.
Edit: I may have misubderstood the question. If the device is not being allowed internet access at all, its safe to be on your network as long as you are careful what you load onto it. Malware on the XP device would still have access to your network. But yes if its contained behind your firewall and locked in, its not a problem in itself. I'd question why it needs to be on the network at all if you're not giving it internet access though.
Haven't there been videos showing either XP or 98 or both connected as fresh installs and within minutes having all sorts of issues?
Nobody is targeting XP these days, and you have to be trying to get infected within minutes. Can it happen? Yes.
But behind your firewall with NAT it cannot magically get infected from the internet unless you do something.
The bots out there do.
That's too theoretical!
XP itself will "do something" and expose itself.