Microsoft Stops Supporting Win98 Early 477
Christopher_G_Lewis writes "Today Microsoft announced that it is 'not feasible to make the extensive changes necessary to Windows Explorer on Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition (SE), and Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (ME) to eliminate the vulnerability' to fix Security Bulletin MS06-15. Granted, the vulnerability is easily prevented by basic firewalling, but this basically is the first time Microsoft has admitted that Windows 98 is so broken that it's crazy to be running it on today's Internet."
Quick Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Quick Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Liability? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not so sure they actually said that, did they? Or did you put words in their mouth?
Cost Benefit Analysis (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quick Question (Score:3, Interesting)
I have 3 PCs in my office. My main one is Windows XP, but the others are Windows 98 and Windows 95 machines.
These are all software development platforms, and it is not practical to upgrade the OS on them since they are older
machines with limited horsepower and memory. It also isn't practical to move the software development tools to
the new PC because of compatibility issues. The Win95 machines gets used occasionally, but the Win98 is used almost daily
(I connect to it with UltraVNC).
I'm not concerned about the lack of Microsoft support. I don't use it to surf the net or read email and
I never install anything on it.
I still run Windows 98 at home and not upgrading (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the reasons why I have not upgraded is also that Win'98 is the last Windows that has full, native DOS easily accessible, so that older games work. In the recent years this argument has lost significance due to DosBox, though, but many DOS4GW games did not work properly only some time ago.
"You're crazy to run Win'98 in todays internet" is not exactly true. Win'98 has only one service that is being offered and that is the samba file/printer sharing. Turn that off and you have no open ports on a Win'98 machine - compared to Win2000 or XP where you have loads of ports active (think of all the RPC worms of the yesteryear). Yes, my Win'98 is behind a firewall, but even if it weren't I wouldn't be too concerned. I'm not using samba sharing (and yes, I've verified this with nmap).
The only attack that works would be against the TCP/IP stack itself (read: Winnuke), but that has been patched ages ago.
I'm going to keep running my Win'98 until games will require DirectX 10. Then I'll make a decision on whether I'll upgrade to Vista or check out how Cedega works at that point (Also, Dosbox probably runs everything by then). Why should I pay for intermediate versions (2k, XP, 2003 server) when Win'98 does everything that I want? Win'98 is light (compared to multimedia-laden XP) and secure enough for a single-user environment.
Re::O (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think that linux is just less of a target because it has less users; it is more secure because you hardly ever run as super-user.
For me on my system windows is over 30 seconds slower to load up
The safety cannot be said to be good just because the only reason that it is insecure is because it is visable (although I disagree) the safety is bound up with all aspects that affect it and cannot be deviod from that
I know that it is possible to use windows in a secure way and be safe (I've only ever had one virus since I moved from 98 to XP) but for me Linux is just better in this area
Re:Quick Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, both of these older operating systems are crap so I suppose comparisons are pointless.
Re::O (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:not considerably early (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Easy there mister submitter (Score:1, Interesting)
How many software companies have been promised that?
Looking at it another way, they have taken 8 years to fix their shoddy release (and it still aint really right).
The internet and networks were well known in 1995, Bill chose to ignore it and choose marketing over quality. I think those decisions are biting now.
Re:Quick Question (Score:1, Interesting)
Funny you say that. My lab has an expensive scientific instrument (bought way back), and it is controlled by a computer that must run windows 3.1. Not 3.11, not windows for workgroups, not win 95, not win 98 (we've tried them all). The instrument still works fine, and replacing it would cost over $100,000, so we're keeping it. It is networked, because copying everything to/from floppy is a pain. We do have it firewalled off though.
Re:Missed business opportunity? (Score:1, Interesting)
a POS system (for instance). Since those kind of embedded systems are never used for web browsing this vulnerability has pretty minimal impact on those systems.
They aren't "never" used for web browsing. I'm part of a chain of retail shipping stores, and a number of stores use POS and manifest systems that still run Windows 98. Said systems are often used for web browsing, either internally (using MSIE components in apps or intranet sites), or for accessing resources on the net like USPS zip code lookup, tracking, etc.
If MS isn't supporting Win98... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well, it *is* old (Score:3, Interesting)
Solaris 2.6 was released in February 1997. Last ship was July 2001. It drops off support in July this year. That makes for nine years of support, the first six of which were complete with rfe and cosmetic bugs being fixed.
How about Solaris 8? Solaris 8 was released in March 2000. We have still not done that last ship for it, so this means that there will be phase one suport for at least until mid 2008, and phase 2 support until at least mid 2011. Folks, that's 11 years and still may be more depending on when we have the last ship of Solaris 8.
Old age don't exclude OS from getting proper support. Microsoft is just beeing lazy and greedy. They want to force upgrades on people. Too bad Win98 was good enough OS for many, many people. They don't need anything above (ME, XP, Vista). Now MS is playing dirty tricks.
It's funny how MS is saying
Re::O (Score:1, Interesting)
Google's systems and search appliances are based on RedHat 6.2 (Zoot), still using a lot of older software and kernels.
Re:I still run Windows 98 at home and not upgradin (Score:3, Interesting)
I then install Win2K/XP so that I always have the option of booting straight into DOS.
This not only allows me to play old games, it also allows me to run PartitionMagic for DOS (a real lifesaver) w/o having to dig out boot disks.
Re::O (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:More Proof (Score:3, Interesting)
Sort of. The kernals are different, the DLL's are pretty much the same. The Win32 API is an abstract layer that Microsoft sold us on. One of the selling points was "code for win32 and your programs will run on 9.x and NT based systems". Win98SE runs wicked fast on my wifes AMD64 and has an uptime of over three months.
The Win32API is from NT, not Win9x. Binary compatibility is because the NT Win32 APi was used in Win9x, however the underlying kernel of the OS was NOT the same.
If you would notice Windows NT can also run Win16 and also could run OS/2 16 applications 'binary' compatible because of the subsystem nature of the NT kernel. The same reason you can run 'BSD' binaries in the Windows NT BSD Unix subsystem. Understand?
As for any DLLs being the same, this was only true of 'applications' running on the OS, NOT THE OS itself. Even the 'common' DLLs that existed on both Win9X and NT4 at the OS level were 'different' DLLs for the most part, try dropping a common DLL from Win9x to NT4 and notice the DLL fails. There are many reasons for this, many stemming from the security in the NT version of the DLLs to the Unicode differences.
The Win32 (Subsystem) runs on the NT Architecture, that is why it is binary compatible with Win9x. NT is a client/server kernel architecture, that is why it can also run Win16 and even BSD subsystems 'equally' along side the Win32 or Win64 subsystems.
Um, Win95 ran on my 386/16sx (PS/1). I have screen shots. It worked fine until you enabled 32bit disk support. If you don't know the differences between the 9.x and NT kernels might I suggest Windows System Programming Secrets by Pietrek or any Windows programming book by Andrew Schulman.
Um, of course it ran... Ok, you do REALIZE that a 386 processor is 32bit? What the hell are you smoking? Also the 32bit disk support in Win9x had NOTHING to do with the kernel or even the CPU it was running on, it had to with whether your mainboard chipsets would allow Win9x to bypass the Bios for I/O to this device and not use a version of Real Mode to access your hard drives. Even Win3.x had this feature. You are seriously confused on several things here.
The Win9x kernel was NOTHING like the NT kernel, you seriously need to read 'Inside WindowsNT' or at least go to WikiPedia.
XP Modern kernal my ass. Its the same HAL/Kernal that was released with Windows NT 3.1
It has more kernal calls with some code reviews thrown in. Disassemble or do a bdiff someday on the different NT kernels. You will get sued by Microsoft if you publish the results.
Well, wrong again, surprise. The HAL has changed, as the x86 architecture has 'changed' over the years. The HAL from NT 3.1 was under 64KB, the current HAL in XP is around 128KB. That would be a 'bit' of a change considering how little takes place in the HAL. (Hardware Abstraction Layer)
Also you seem to think the only aspect of the NT Kernel is the HAL. Again, wrong. This is just the 'platform' Hardware Abstraction Layer, that provides the hardware interface to the NT Kernel. The NT Kernel was well designed for its time, but it also has evolved over the years, the process scheduling, handling of drivers (like Video dropping Rings and Back up in Vista) to 100s of other KERNEL level changes.
NT is a Hybrid Kernel, and even for people that study Kernels, it is a bit hard to 'lump' into a category, some will call it a microkernel, others will say it is the opposite. What the NT kernel DOES do, is it allows multi-process communication at the Kernel level without the performance loss that other non-monolitic kernels fight.
The hybrid nature of the NT kernel is what made it unique, and even to this day it is still Unique in the world of Kernels. Again, this is why NT can have full binary subsystems that run on the Kernel, and function as their own OSes. Hence why if you would take a look at WindowsNT/2K/XP/Vista you will notice the default OS that