Someone is trying to log in to my account from WINDOWS 7!!!

Vitaly@feddit.uk to Technology@lemmy.world – 361 points –

How can you use such an operating system now

92

If only you knew how many critical systems are running old versions of Windows... It's mind boggling

Embedded space running window ce still go brrrrrr

OP complaining about win 7 while I am unironically using Win XP because nostalgia.

You laugh but the fact that you got a login confirmation notification means he got your password now. He'll just need to guess your email password next and you'll be truly owned. Set up 2fa on your email account if you haven't set it up already.

Jokes on him. I don't even know the password to either account

me emailing the hacker asking for my password

In the UK, a lot of our government still uses XP and a lot of our public embedded devices (e.g. the tills in the Co-Op) run on Internet Explorer.

Some random Thai hacker using 7 isn't that much of a stretch.

What are Co-Ops?

It's a kind of shop. They do other things as well, but the shop is the most memorable. Co-Op is short for "Co-Operative".

They're related to the Co-Op Party, which is part of the Labour party (a popular left-wing political party).

That is... Not quite the same as I thought whenever I read that word. Around here, a co-op is a collective purchasing program or a store that participates in a similar program. They buy foods in bulk at wholesale prices. By bulk, I don't mean the family size bags available at a membership club like Costco. I mean like a 100lb bag of flour meant for a restaurant or an entire pallet of something.

A group of people get together and make note of what they want to buy, and if enough people want the same item it gets purchased. Then they all meet up on delivery day and split the item at the amounts they paid for.

I'm assuming that is very different than what you are describing.

Clearly they should be using Windows XP instead.

Vista*

*ME

95*

7!!! is a really high number, I doubt there will ever be that many versions of Windows

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How can you use such an operating system now

To be honest, it still works better than Windows 10 or Windows 11.

Problem is it's 3 years past EOL and hasn't received any security updates in that time.

It's functional, just not secure.

There actually are updates to it as for the last three years Microsoft has continued to patch it under the commercial "Extended Security Update" program - that only ended in January 2023.
You just couldn't get them as a home user without doing a lot of tweaking on your own.

Wouldn't be surprised if it's some compromised machine that someone else is controlling for illegal activities.

Nothing is, just accept this and plan with it in mind.

Do you use it?

I dualboot Manjaro with Linux Mint.
But on school computers we even have Windows XP. Not much you can do with 256MiB of RAM.

Even my school in ukraine use to have better computers, where do you live?

Slovakia. I mean, it's not all of them. Most of it can even run Windows 7. Recently they put Windows 10 on some of them, but good luck even just trying to launch a browser.
In June they already got rid of the last 32-bit machines.

Schools often have very old computers but don’t let that discourage anyone. We had old Apple IIe’s in 1998 in my high school “computer literacy” class. I became a programmer in part because I was bored and learned BASIC on the Apple II’s and my TI-85 calculator also supported BASIC.

Sometimes, a crappy computer teaches you more than a modern one. (Only if you want to be a programmer, though. Don’t learn Office 2000 because politicians in your country won’t budget for some cheap, modern laptops.)

The TI83 Plus was my gateway drug. Learning BASIC and the fundamentals behind connecting it to my computer. Emulating software to test code on different models. It was fascinating and engaging. The fun and learning involved with doing anything and everything you can with the technology that's available to you is something that I think is lost for a depressing majority of youth now.

I think putting up with the "crappiness" of a system is a very good test to see if someone will become more tech affinitive or not.

Most users would never put up with that unless they don't know any better and don't mind that it takes a bit longer.

Not to downplay anyone that's not as good with tech though, by the way, if anyone read it that way.

Not sure, it just taught me to write really efficient code!

I still did until last year. It's probably still the best operating system ever made.

I had to upgrade 4 years ago when I bought new hardware and went to 10 and now 11. I still miss 7, it was insanely more performant and feature complete. From a UI point of view, anyway.

.....what's wrong with 10?

You know how when you press the Windows key and are able to type into the searchbar? Prior to 10, this bar did an instant local-only search of your desktop applications and (if you enabled it) select cached documents. Imagine building up the muscle memory of using this to launch applications for a decade or two to the point where you don't even look at the screen anymore when launching apps. Now imagine that Windows 10 comes along and introduces a mandatory internet search that has to complete before it lets you see the local results that you were actually looking for.

Now imagine not being able to forget how snappy it used to be every single time you launch an application. Imagine the annoyance of being punished for a typo by having Edge open up a Bing search instead of the application you were trying to launch. Imagine not noticing the error and waiting 5 seconds for Bing to boot up, only to be confusedly greeted by a search you didn't ask for in a browser you wish you could uninstall. Imagine installing third-party applications to try and restore the old search experience only for it to get regularly broken by OS updates you cannot opt out of and are only sometimes notified of in advance (another "feature" that Windows 10 brought).

IMO Windows 7 was the last "pure" Windows before the power balance at Microsoft tipped in favor of the cloud & sales people.

Woah man, why wouldn't you want your computers key search features to just go straight to bing result? Are you using some kind of crazy computer that has things on physical memory? Fuck that put it all on the cloud man. It's the future.

you can disable the web search, and it's really snappy with ms web integration garbage.

You can disable searching as a fall-through, but you cannot disable web results appearing inside of the menu itself, which is what slows it down. At least, that was the case for the first 4 years or so before I stopped using Windows 10 and switched to Linux.

you can fully disable all online/web search features in search using a group policy on Pro versions of windows. afaik there are even one click tools that can do that for you (pretty sure even good ol' OOSU10 can do it)

You can, and the search speed is much improved. I deployed that group policy to all my w10/11 boxes.

you can, it's just harder to do. I suggest find a debloater tool, and use it. Also remove cortana thing to make it even faster. There are some tools that let's you remove all WinRT apps

... or I could just use dmenu on an OS that I don't have to "debloat" to make useable?

could just be the custom user-agent string configured in whatever browser or script they're running.

I'm using a Win7 machine at work, because I have to support a system that saw it's last update in 2014. There is actually a Win10 compatible version of this software, but it only supports maybe a third of the chips of the original software, and sadly the ones we use are not among those.

And it can get worse. I've got an oscilloscope that "runs" under a heavily modified version of Win98...

Why you shouldn't develop production grade software for Windows part 25.

Just to be the devil's advocate here, you can make the same mistake with embedded Linux.

Any old software should not be in the network.

Assuming it is not on the network, I don't care what OS it runs. I'd like to see if I could run your OS on a virtual machine and give access to the hardware.

Does your scope give good resolution? How does it compare?

The scope is an old 4-Channel digital scope from HP (now Agilent). It cost about a fortune when it was bought, and now I got my hands on it for a (small) donation in the barbeque fund. It needs some work (some dials' contacts need rework, and it definitly needs a new fan that does not sound like a starting plane. But otherwise, it is still good.

It only was retired because for our next project, 2GS won't cut it. And the amount of samples it could store was not much (for our needs), too. Still overkill for my private projects, with the bonus that I don't need to dig through manuals, as I know this thing inside out.

Reminds me of a recording studio I used to work at which had an MS-DOS machine long after Windows XP came out because it was what we printed cassette labels on. With a dot matrix printer.

A lot of legacy equipment still uses 98/XP machines because it literally just needs to work.

i'd use windows 7 for daily drive, way better than 8,10 or 11 imo

It's not that hard. In fact I set up a windows vista computer for a child to use not that long ago.

Why

Because he hates his child and wants her/him to suffer, so he forces him to use windows vista. That's an obvious answer

Because she is 9 and doesn't know how to do much of anything with a computer. So to ensure she doesn't break anything or end up where she shouldn't.... Windows vista

to ensure she doesn't break anything or end up where she shouldn't...

So she uses an operating system that's near to 2 decades old OS with years of live without any security patches whatsoever? I would say that's rather more dangerous for her, than using an up to date operating system.

Just install an up to date os of your choice (be it Linux (Mint) or Windows) and create her an account without admin privileges and some reliable antivirus (especially on windows). If you want to be really safe you can filter her network traffic. There are countless tools for this. One of the easier ones to use is NextDNS even though it's possible there are even better solutions.

So to ensure she doesn’t break anything or end up where she shouldn’t… Windows vista

What thinks can't break on µsoft Windows Vista, but can on other versions?

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It uses the lotion or else it gets the hose again.

Close, but wrong.

It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.

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I still have one laptop running Windows 7 because it has some software I like to use that can't be installed on later versions.