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captainsblogTwo midnights ago, two computers under this roof essentially died. Ded like ded things. One's Eleanor's day-to-day machine, at least four computers removed, which we've kept, faults and all, for some old programs that don't play well with 21st Century Microsoft; the other, a gift of sorts from Cameron when he moved in and/or out of here, a tower that I moved into their room and use for similar obsolescences like (until the past few days) AOL.
Both of them, running Windows XP- the best darned operating system in the universe for the past decade, and so popular that Gates and Company felt the need to kill it as of midnight on 8 April. It still runs, mind you, but it will no longer be updated with security patches and malicious software removal tools or all those other things that annoyed the shit out of us for years.
"No longer," that is, unless you're one of a certain number of foreign gummints. The UK and Netherlands have each ponied up significant poundage to continue to keep their, but only their, XP machines protected from threats- 5.5 quid for the Brits, and an unspecifiedly-Dutch amount to prevent van Xpocalypse.
We don't regularly use either machine for functions requiring internet connectivity, so it won't affect us much (although I did install AOL on the one in Emily's room a month or so ago and its XP-era wireless adapter doesn't play well with the new cable modem/router). But I'm wondering whether the Gates of Hell will back down in a more general sense, given that their security updates for later operating systems will basically tell hackers How I Did It to exploit unprotected XP users (still running on something between 10 and 20 percent of all computers in the world as of this week).
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Ultimately, though, IT people had bigger things to worry about by The Day After the XPocalypse:
The tiny padlock next to Web addresses that promised to protect our most sensitive information – passwords, stored files, bank details, even Social Security numbers – is broken.
A flaw has been discovered in one of the Internet’s key encryption methods, potentially forcing a wide swath of websites to swap out the virtual keys that generate private connections between the sites and their customers.
Tuesday afternoon, many organizations were heeding the warning. Companies like Lastpass, the password manager, and Tumblr, the social network owned by Yahoo, said they had issued fixes and warned users to immediately swap out their usernames and passwords.
I don't use either of those sites, and Eleanor hasn't used Tumblr in months, so we're okay. But the more these sites bomb us for personal information, the scarier shit like this gets. Last week, I brought back the Android tablet used most recently as Eleanor's main computer to my guru, because its headphone jack had died; rather than fix it, these days it's cheaper to simply replace, so I picked up a shiny new version of the same Android system's device- and have been watching in amazement as it wirelessly and seamlessly retrieves dozens of bookmarks and desktop icons from the one we turned in last week, without even asking it to.
I suppose I could just ask it to stop by speaking into the flowerpot, but who knows what THAT would lead to.
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Then there's the stuff that's just plain spooky.
A few months ago, this Ol' Reliable laptop stopped being that, and a different Guru-like friend replaced its keyboard, and did many other repairs, to restore it to health. The only casualty was its onboard wifi, which stopped working. But no matter- a USB jobbie worked just fine, even after being dropped and snapped out of its case several times....
Until today. When I got to my other office, the blue light special didn't come on, until it, randomly, did. All afternoon, it blinked on and off like a beer sign, but by day's end it was connecting pretty consistently. On arriving home, though, it stopped. No Internets for you!, said the Wifi Nazi. And no amount of wiggling and jiggling would bring it back to life.
But, like a bolt out of the blue, the INTERNAL wifi suddenly decided to start working again, so that's why you're reading this. I suspect this is a precursor of problems with the whole internal state of this almost six-year-old Vista laptop, so I've already begun budgeting for a replacement, but for now? I'll take whatever magic I can get my hands on.
And at least Vista is still supported with security updates. This week, anyway:P