perhaps an open stack (hardware and software), like risc-v running linux has a chance to pry open the security blanket?

You can get a literal blue screen of death there!

Check this, from slashdot: Almost All WannaCry Victims Were Running Windows 7

“According to data released today by Kaspersky Lab, roughly 98 percent of the computers affected by the ransomware were running some version of Windows 7”

And almost all were corporate users, those tend to have large intranets.

Or in other words, hold outs that need to upgrade

My hook, crook or wanna cry, i wouldn’t put it past MS.

Heck, most stories on WannaCry even read like PR pieces to update!

oh the joys of IDE CD burners burning cardiac data at 4x….

2/ milliseconds are an eternity for modern hardware, take a modern galvo laser with a 0.025 mm spot size scanning at 1000 mm/sec. you have an entire off, latch on, stay on, latch off, off again event duration of 1000 / 0.025 = 40 th of a millisecond, or 25 microoseconds the latch on and off durations have to be of the order of 1 microsecond or better, in reality you’re working at nanosecond timings and this is all feedback looped to it knows precisely where galvo mirrors are at all times, as opposed to the basic DIY stepper CNC Mach kit that kind of *assumes* that all 17,725 pulses sent to the X stepper were correctly implemented… none of this shit runs windows or anything even remotely related, custom linux builds are surprisingly common as a matter of interest, big brands roll their own proprietary code.

3/ I guess you can argue that SMB isn’t “windows code” but we are way past the days where “a single bit of malware” only had a single method of implementation, oh dear, no SMB so I’ll stop playing…. back in the day I could sucessfully defeat 99.99% of malware simply by installing windows to C:/killmenow back when you routinely had that ability at install time, funnily enough about 50% of commercial software would also develop bugs ranging from annoying to total failure to run if I did that, so it wasn’t just malware writers that relied on standard parameters.

4/ the point of the article wasn’t *just* a rant at XP, when you have a fucking cardiac ward in a fucking teaching hospital that has XP machines (and I mean the OS and hardware alike) running on 10/12/14 year old legacy PC hardware that my company LITERALLY had to go on ebay to get spares for, you got fucking problems, and all those articles ^H^H^H press released from various NHS trusts all saying they don’t have any XP in house, all total fucking lies, oh yeah, technically that shit is subcontracted out to McKesson corp so it’s not our shit, even though it is the only shit in the actual cardiac unit that does that job, and without that job the surgeons have a *real* fucking hard time studying your case and planning your op…

Oh look, here is a photo I took myself in an actual cardiac unit of a pc running a windows xp desktop… https://wimminz.wordpress.com/proof/
want another pic showing the fact that it is plugged into the network ? how about ones showing the guts and dustbunnies and actual 15 year old hardware and serial numbers and everything, how about my case notes where I gut two of the machines to make one that works out of all the components, cos, you know, it’s a fucking cardiac unit and waiting 7 days for a fix may make my company money but it doesn’t really help patients or staff…

“Why didn’t WannaCry infect Windows XP or 10 computers?

Because the responsible for Friday’s attacks used code from several sources, and researchers have determined that the code used didn’t include functions for Windows XP or Windows 10. (Britain’s National Health Service has said its WinXP PCs were not infected by WannaCry, despite initial reports that they were.)

However, that doesn’t mean WinXP and Win10 are safe. If unpatched, both have the same vulnerability as other versions of Windows that different exploit code could take advantage of, which is why Microsoft issued an emergency patch for it.”

One reason people stay with legacy Windows is because it’s closer to the metal, so to speak, you can drive machinery down to a millisecond or less over the good ol printer port, which is obviously very important for machining. Remember that modern Windows are not a real time OS, not certified for real time operations, you need expensive third party software (such as IntervalZero’s RTX) to turn Windows 10 into a real-time operating system just to match what we already had.