Just talked to a woman from a company in the same holding as mine. They still run their computers on windows xp. They're in health care and deal with sensitive, confidential patient data.

[–] tiredofsametab@fedia.io 4 points 21 hours ago

I used to work in healthcare IT until around 2008ish. Various clinics had things running on 3.11, 95, 98, etc.

For the 3.11 case, it was only controlling the door card/lock system IIRC and was not otherwise on the network, but some of the others, less so. We didn't have direct control over the sites' decisions and couldn't really enforce anything so us removing them was not possible. We did everything we could to convince the site mgmt, of course.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

This week I heard from a network group lead of a university hospital, that they have a similar issue. Some medical devices that come with control computers can't be upgraded, because they were only certified for medical use with the specific software they came with.

They just isolate those devices as much as possible on the network, not much else to do, when there is no official support and recertification for upgrading. And of course nobody wants to spend half a million on a new imaging device when the old one is still fine except for the OS of the control computer.

Sounds like a shitty place to be, I pity those guys.

That said, if you were talking about normal client computers then it's inexcusable.

[–] applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 20 hours ago

It baffles me that medical device manufacturers use windows for fucking anything. You'd think just the licensing cost would push them away, but it being hot garbage for embedded software should have been enough. It's amazing any medical device certification process would allow them to use it at all, with the notorious unreliability and not giving a shit what you think about updates. People could die because of a fucking windows update at the wrong time.

[–] abbadon420@lemm.ee 3 points 1 day ago

Yes, normal client computers. Just for simple document work. Inexcusable indeed

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The criticality of any given service is inversely proportional to how recently released was the technology that it runs on.

This, if you see some ancient machine sitting there humming, don't even make eye contact with that mf, don't even think about it. In fact, try to minimize your time in the same room so when it eventually goes tits up, you don't get blamed.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago

Quarterly profits above all else bby

[–] ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's because every version of Windows since XP has been kind of dogshit

[–] ShoeThrower@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 day ago

It's only been 10 years since XP stopped getting security updates, they'll be fine.

[–] cfi@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

If this is the US, I believe that is a HIPPA violation