3 ms·
Do yourself a favor and wrap that thing in a VM
by beeboobaa 3y ago
Do yourself a favor and wrap that thing in a VM
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoWhy? I have a Windows XP laptop online only for that exact same use case and I don't do any banking on it, nor am I signed in any accounts whatsoever, so what's the risk? If some malware were to compromise it somehow, there's absolutely no credentials or valuable info on there to steal or encrypt for ransom, and the machine is on it's own VLAN, so if it were to hypothetically get infected with something, the malware has nowhere else to pivot in my network just in case someone made some ultra-specific malware that can target both Windows XP machines and Amazon Alexa devices together as if I'm running Iranian nuclear centrifuges or something and have state actors targeting me. Plus, is there any Windows XP malware still circulating in the wild online mainstream? Feels like worrying about catching smallpox today.
- rcarmo 3y agoI wouldn't compare it to actual diseases. As an European, the anti-vaxxer movement provokes profound disillusionment in me, and that last sentence... Apologies, I had to say this. (You are correct in that using a XP machine is likely less risky today if you're only doing so in a LAN and with minimal access to the Internet)
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Apologies, I had to say this. Why? It was just a silly example, not a anti-vax promotion.
- beeboobaa 3y agoSo that once it breaks you can just restore the disk image from when it worked.
- rcarmo 3y agoYou likely don’t do a lot of hardware development. VMs cannot talk TTL and even low-level USB properly without a significant amount of hassle. Typically unplugging peripherals (or rebooting an MCU) will disconnect the device from the host, and then you usually have to reconnect them to the VM and lose logging output.