Microsoft’s First Windows XP Patch in Years Is a Bad Sign

XP has been out of support for 5 years. I get it, IT is hard and expensive, but you've had 5 years (and multiple years leading up to it) to find a solution. At this point it's your fault, not Microsoft's or your software vendor's.

More “let’s hate on Microsoft because it’s trendy” bandwagoneers. I guess the 25 year old vulnerability in bash was not a bad thing, eh? Or scp’s 35 year old vuln did not affect anyone? Come on, people. Stop acting like Microsoft is the only vendor worth criticizing

A bad sign? Far from it. It's good that they're still supporting a vintage OS when it matters, even though Windows XP users really should have moved to better options (GNU/Linux, ReactOS, whatever) by now.

Actually, support for XP for POS terminals was terminated on 2019-04-09, that is, less than 2 months ago. One may argue that a POS connected to the Internet would be a no-no, but the hack that enabled faking normal XP installs as POS devices to keep getting updates has been well known for years, and just a registry key away, so the number of connected XP/"POS" devices might well be much higher than expected.

&gt;The saving grace for all of this is that computers running Windows 8 and up aren’t affected.<p>Burying the lede? The implication here is that all unpatched Windows 7 computers will be utterly pwned within 24-48 hours of that announcement - i.e. a week ago. That&#x27;s <i>way</i> more serious than a Windows XP problem. Tons of people are still on Windows 7 - justifiably.

WinXP is still very much alive in the retail sector. Retailers are extremely sensitive about migrating their systems.