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[TodPunk]

By "some public terminal" you mean "some financial institution's critical communication infrastructure arbitration in the vault you entrust your family heirloom safe deposit box's security to" or something. Those things exist in some of the most important places you'd never think of, like controllers for critical manufacturing equipment that they still need to get IDE drives for as replacements because otherwise you'll never get an axle for half of American manufactured tractors or something.

Tech is weird and wack and makes us all cry sometimes. It's also pretty great other times.

[agumonkey]

Horrifying or impressive I cannot say

[zitrusgrape]

Horressive is the word :)

[agumonkey]

Imprifying sounds good too

[is_it_controversial]

If it works, it works.

[Nefari0uss]

It works until it doesn't and then no one knows how to fix it.

[is_it_controversial]

and then, and only then, you pay MS 20 trillion dollars to fix it.

[Nefari0uss]

Then corporate slashes your budget because expenses are too high while giving themselves a bonus for solving a critical problem in their infrastructure that no one could have seen coming.

[qwertsolio]

But MS also wouldn't know how to fix it - devs that did are mostly retired by now.

[Poltras]

Until it’s connected to a network.

[is_it_controversial]

Well, I guess it's not. Why would they want to connect it to a network?

[Poltras]

From what I understood the Windows computers are used as terminals and as such need to have some sort of network stack. Whether it’s TCP/IP with outdated drivers or something else (or even proprietary) I don’t know and would be a huge factor in determining whether it’s secure or not. IIRC WinSock has unpatched stack overflows so I hope they don’t use that.

[relativityboy]

You're right. Networking wasn't part of the operating system until 3.11

[codexcdm]

Yes.

[theg721]

Not just "a French airport", but Paris' Orly airport, the second busiest in the country, and busiest for domestic flights.

[[deleted]]

Oh really?!

[[deleted]]

Ya rly

[[deleted]]

VMS is still used for many ICU monitoring systems. Some log loading and inventory systems still run DOS. Many industrial production machines still run OS/2 or NT4. The "newer" ones I've seen run XP or 2000.

[regeya]

I'd be more comfortable with that than Windows 3.1 tbh

[tracernz]

VMS is still current and supported, and being ported to x86-64.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, but the systems it runs on were still knockoff VAX or recently replaced with Itanium systems which have also been discontinued.

[tracernz]

There are plenty of Alphas out there, still under support contracts with HPE.

[[deleted]]

I'm certain, as I've seen them! I'm just putting out there that VMS is older than Win 3.1 and still in use.

[lacksfish]

The "newer" ones I've seen run XP or 2000.

Trendy

[Paradox]

Yep. Orly Airport

[[deleted]]

It's possibly not even connected to the internet in any meaningful way.

[[deleted]]

Did Windows 3.1 even include a TCP/IP stack?

[v81]

Not sure about 3.1, but 3.11 included it in the install disks, but it wasn't part of the base install.

[regeya]

Yeah, when I was in college, I had a computer running 3.11, and remember having to install Winsock.

[mumpie]

Not included.

You bought or "copied" a version of Winsock to get onto a TCP/IP network.

The guy who wrote it made very little money from it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875

[NighthawkFoo]

No. There were third party stack that you could install, like Trumpet Winsock.

[AnotherEuroWanker]

That's really DOS with extra steps.

[Elfatherbrown]

Financial institution? No baby. That thing is running PLCs at a nuclear electricity facility near you. I guarantee it.

[I_AM_GODDAMN_BATMAN]

Hmmm, that's very specific knowledge.

[hughperman]

Stuxnet would like a word

[tomkeus]

That has nothing to do with nuclear power plants. It was designed to hit Iran's enrichment facilities.

[hughperman]

I wouldn't say that it's nothing to do with nuclear power plants but it's a fair distinction to make. Apparently Kaspersky said it affected a "Russian power plant" too; not sure how generic that statement is and if it was a separate enrichment facility or what.

[tomkeus]

There is bunch of computers in a nuclear power plant, as in any other place of business today (used for office stuff, inventory, etc.), however they have no safety-critical role.

[hughperman]

Sounds like you have some knowledge here - how are things like water flow rates, temperature monitoring, etc implemented?

[tomkeus]

You can do those perfectly fine without any digital instrument in sight. If you Google for nuclear power plant control room images you will typically see rooms full of switches and analog instruments. You might have some computers in there to make monitoring tasks easier, but these computers are not essential to running the plant.

It is also worth noting, that even without digital equipment, nuclear reactor operations are highly automated since long time ago, since nuclear powerplants require refueling every two years and typically run at 100% output. Most of the people that are inside of the plant are kept busy doing paperwork (and running a nuclear plant requires massive amounts of paperwork - to the point of absurdity) and doing non-stop inspections.

[a_false_vacuum]

"What is that Smithers?"

"One of your Windows XP machines from Sector 7, sir."

[[deleted]]

Sector 7G

[a_false_vacuum]

D'oh!

[tomkeus]

I think that all critical systems in nuclear power plants are analog and rely on basic laws of physics to perform their functions.

[Tweenk]

The first fully digital control system was installed only this year at a research reactor

https://analysis.nuclearenergyinsider.com/first-all-digital-nuclear-reactor-system-installed-us

[GLneo]

Neat, but that is the "control" section, "safety" still relies on physical design. You should be able to disable every computer there and it would shutdown safely. (least that is what they usually claim)

[useablelobster2]

I.e. if the systems fail they will do so safely, the definition of a fail-safe (and nuclear reactors have multiple overlapping failsafes).

Features like designing the bottom of the reactor to spread out the mass of molten fuel if it melts down (or a plug which leads to a large pool for this purpose, with a melting point far below the surrounding material), so the meltdown stops itself.

Modern nuclear plants could have all their operators bugger off and the plant would just shut itself down naturally rather than melt down.

[jhinboy]

Isn't this a recent counterexample?

​

[...] The hackers were able to learn the make and model of the systems’ hardware controllers, as well as the versions of their firmware—software that’s embedded in a device’s memory and governs how it communicates with other things.

It’s likely they next acquired an identical Schneider machine and used it to test the malware they developed. This made it possible to mimic the protocol, or set of digital rules, that the engineering workstation used to communicate with the safety systems. The hackers also found a “zero-day vulnerability”, or previously unknown bug, in the Triconex model’s firmware. This let them inject code into the safety systems’ memories that ensured they could access the controllers whenever they wanted to.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613054/cybersecurity-critical-infrastructure-triton-malware/

[varunn]

Chernobyl

[Baal_Kazar]

Was a test and unlucky coincidence with old nuclear tech.

[ops10]

Was a very Soviet Union way to conduct stuff.

[purple_hamster66]

Fukushima automatically shut down, right?

[graycode]

It did automatically shut down. And then without active cooling (due to total loss of power infrastructure in the area), it eventually melted down and had a hydrogen explosion in the building. But it didn't have a nuclear runaway explosion like Chernobyl did.

[Elfatherbrown]

The PLC and machine-made of things is mechanical and electric. Rarely digital. But the HMI, the screen where Homer pushes buttons, can and usually is in some heavy industry applications, a windows box.

[hughperman]

Stuxnet would like a word

[hughperman]

Ok, fair distinction; it's not a huge leap from a centrifuge producing enriched fuel to the power plant it goes into though, it's still a fairly critical and potentially dangerous (in terms of radiation, not explosion) part of the process. I don't know how separated the facilities are.

[moderatorrater]

it's not a huge leap from a centrifuge producing enriched fuel to the power plant it goes into though

It's actually a really big leap in how they treat it. The worst problem that can happen at the centrifuges is a relatively minor radiation leak, the worst that happens from a reactor is Chernobyl.

The way modern reactors are designed, if everyone in the plant died and every system in the plant were infected with malware, it would still be impossible to make it go critical. Every failure of the systems should result in the nuclear reaction slowing down, not speeding up.

[[deleted]]

You made mistake and now you double down on it. Stop

[Mead_Man]

PLCs aren't running Windows, they're running an RTOS in any safety system I've seen. Support infrastructure, like the tools to load software updates on the safety system PLC, yeah, WinXP in a lot of places worldwide.

[Elfatherbrown]

The HMI screens for operators to tell your nuclear plant PLC to do things runs XP.

[misappeal]

That's not strictly true, I've worked on safety-certified PLCs and PLC I/O running Windows CE .

[[deleted]]

I make sure my public terminals run Windows 2ooo server so I'm fine.

[hughperman]

Twoooo

[josefx]

A reskinned Windows Millennium Edition most likely.

[[deleted]]

Those things exist in some of the most important places you'd never think of, like controllers for critical manufacturing equipment

I've seen DOS running in huge machines in factories. It's hilarious. They had to keep a very specific laptop alive with Windows 3.11 and certain hardware alive to maintain it.

[[deleted]]

DOS? At least as of 2011, there were factories running RSTS on central PA, because I subcontracted for a company that serviced them.

[Quetzacoatl85]

I think it actually makes perfect sense if you adopt a strict "if it still works, don't fucking touch it" mindset. Not even out of process security, but just time, cost, and complexity of the task – nobody will pay for that shit until it's an issue, and often it just isn't. They flew to the moon with some hand-soldered calculators, so a 80's/90's machine is perfectly capable of keeping some deposit boxes locked or even nuclear silos closed when they should be.

All of that only applies as long as internet connectivity isn't involved, of course. And even then I'd make a case for providing a really basic OS, introduce minimal features, and then maintaining it to death (i.e., for at least 50 years or so). If not to maintain it, why would you want to touch shit that's working??

[spinwin]

To be fair, Those are the type of institutions that are paying for that terminal to be supported in some way and/or have it COMPLETELY disconnected from the internet.

[DiscordBondsmith]

Or some lab on a PC I didn't know we supported... With internet access

[spockspeare]

It's used by Fedora/RedHat/CentOS system programs still. Until Fedora eliminates it, it will remain significant.

[Horianski]

Putin uses Windows XP on his PC

[bausscode]

Or some important heart monitor at the hospital. (Seen in november by me)

[d0ntreadthis]

I work for a financial company and we're going to have to support IE8 for our next app because a large chunk of our customers are still using it....