On 03/25/2014 04:50 PM, R.S. wrote: > W dniu 2014-03-25 21:41, Ed Gould pisze: >> I have friends who bought a new PC and it came with windows 8. They >> went out and bought a license for XP and installed XP. >> People are doing this widespread as WINDOWS 8 (and 7 apparently) are >> HATED. > And the relationship to the IBM-MAIN topic is ? > > Maybe they are still using XP systems for TN3270 sessions to a mainframe. Then keystroke capture malware on their un-maintained and compromised XP systems could compromise mainframe logon security and mainframe data.
Personally, I will continue some usage of XP, but only for a few stable Windows applications that either do no network access or only very specific limited Internet access, and even then no native XP systems but only under VirtualBox VMs running under Linux, where they are shielded from outside abuse by Linux firewalls and only active when the application is actually in use, and easily restored to a prior state in a couple of minutes. I actually even continue to run my nicer-than-native-Linux, windows-only scanner support software under Windows 2000 - because the app doesn't require anything recent and Win2K takes even less space and boot time under VirtualBox than Win XP. Win 7 is a real resource hog by comparison, so it really makes no sense to upgrade my virtual machines as long as leaner predecessors still function for my limited usage. I would, however, still consider it an unreasonable security risk to use a back-level, unsupported Windows system, even if isolated to a virtual machine, to connect to a production network or production mainframe environment. -- Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR jcew...@acm.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
