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This part gave me a chill: The Royal Navy’s decision to save money by using Windows for Submarines, a version of Windows XP, as the operating system for its ba

• berkut 10y ago
  Type 45 destroyers are running modified Win2000 OS with a "realtime" kernel. Anyway, defence stuff takes ages to develop, test and go through "trials", so it's quite common the customer gets stuff seven or eight years after development started. In particular, the Astute sub development programme was started in 1997, the first one was laid down in 2001, and was with the RN in 2010, although there were four years of programme delay (as there nearly always is with defence programmes).
• tlb 10y ago
  Though the article seemed to suggest that using the latest-greatest fully-patched auto-updating version would be better. I'm sure that would be far worse. Especially against state actors who can corrupt the update channel. An air-gapped hardened Windows XP with all the optional services turned off is pretty robust.
  • rhizome 10y ago
    Any systems person worth their salary would turn off auto-update and distribute fixes via e.g. GPO or other in-house system update process.
• ScottBurson 10y ago
  Oh. My. Fucking. God. It is shocking to think that my home computer is probably running a newer version of Windows than the U.K.’s military submarines It is shocking to think that a military submarine is running any version of Windows.