[Shiunbird]

The joke stopped being funny long ago. What do we have?

911 dispatcher workstations: directx 9, 10, 11, 12, bluetooth, xbox game centre, windows update, windows firewall, and more 712 background services + the services to keep all this mess secure + the services to update it all + driver for my USB joystick from 1999
Airport displays: the same
Airport fire alarms: the same
ATMs: the same

Is greed, laziness and the power of monopolies really going to eat us all alive?

In my head, a 911 dispatcher workstation could well be a stupid dumb terminal, an airport display could well be a stream of characters device ou some freedos+browser box auto-refreshing a static web page every X seconds, and WHY THE HELL would you install such thing as Windows to run your fire alarm system?!

This is dumb, it's beyond dumb.
"here is our bloated product, add more bloat to keep it safe, and good luck keeping the security settings tight amid all the complexity"
Biology is very quick to push societies that lack any genetic variety to oblivion. Habsburg IT.

I don't know, I haven't been angry for this kind of thing in ages. We deserve it, truly.

[robespierre]

Have you noticed that ATMs have become progressively more laggy over time?
In the city there is a bank branch that still has ATMs that were installed in the 1980s (the bank itself was merged several times since then). No touchscreen, just 9" monochrome CRT screens and a row of buttons. This type of device would utilize something like a Zilog Z80 along with a serial link to a PDP-11 (or a 1200 bps modem over a copper leased line). Moving through screens and inputting numbers is instant, with no noticeable delay at all.
Every other bank branch has touchscreen displays, and as they were updated over time, the response time has gotten worse and worse, with very long delays moving from screen to screen and even lag entering numbers on the keypad. These horrible devices are products of the NCR corporation, and without tearing them apart, it's a safe guess that they have millions of times the computing power of the Z80 units, yet they are hundreds of times slower.
They do one thing the 1980s units couldn't do: display advertisements while making you wait for service. (They also have paper note / cheque acceptors that scan and count money without using deposit envelopes, but I think that is handled by an independent module.)

[Raion]

100% I have experienced that ATMs take ages just to do simple transactions.

It's stupid and annoying. Up until recently there were some in my area that still ran os/2. Pretty damn quick and the ATM fees weren't bad either. They were replaced with some Windows RT bullshit.

[Shiunbird]

++++ this
I've used an ATM 2-3 years ago that had a miscalibrated touch screen. Punch 3 at the very edge, get a 6. Great stuff...

Airports are maddening. Ads now are played where you should only see useful/critical information.
At our local train station, there are pillars surrounded by cylindrical LED panels blasting ads at you all the time.

At the same time, the carbon footprint talk... omg reduce power consumption.

When I ranted about this in Ars, some of the answers I got were like:
"Oh, how do you centrally manage? How do you make sure each display shows only correct data?"
I was not sure if joking or stupid.

An airport could easily be a bunch of SunRay-like devices or... well, dumb text terminals, like they used to be. Worked fine enough, only one computer to restore in case of outage.

And fun fact - it seems that the CEO was McAfee CEO during their big 2010 screw up. The worst that will happen to him will be to retire with a golden parachute. If you had your surgery cancelled because of this crap, good luck rescheduling it to an early term. If you were stuck at an airport, I hope your 5 USD voucher covers the toilet fee.

[commodorejohn]

Habsburg IT.

I'm stealing this.

Have felt for ages that at some point people are going to die on the operating table because of the tech industry's slack-ass approach to development, deployment, and maintenance even of our most critical infrastructure. If that hasn't already happened previously, I'd bet today was that day.

[Shiunbird]

I'm stealing this.

Feel free. I got the idea after first hearing the expression "Habsburg AI" for the hallucinations of ChatGPT and alike after regurgitating on their own output.

What I can't stand is the intellectual laziness of the MBAs leading technical departments.
Is "Windows" or "cloud" really the solution to every single computing need from barcode readers to airline dispatching and booking systems? Do we need to run full-stack operating systems everywhere? (and then, of course, add more on the top to manage and secure it down)
Is an operating system that relies on a kernel-level rootkit for security really secure?

My life at work is a living nightmare. "Oh, this is not so secure, we need to do this". Well, to do this, you need to subscribe to MSFT E3 tier 2 type B. Fine. But to secure MSFT E3 tier 2 type B, you need to subscribe to yet another product. It's basically unacceptable out-of-the-box and, by the time it is half-decent, you are paying a fortune.

To keep the infinitude of possible interactions well-configured, redudant and secure, you need an army of people and, if you sneeze wrong, you get a security breach or a major outage - and pray an update doesn't break everything.
And you wouldn't need any of that if you were running simple VMs or bare metal to begin with.

It's madness. Everyone drinking snake oil as kool aid.

[Shiunbird]

In practical terms, the whole planet relies on a handful of monopolies for our computer needs, and the rest of the industry thrives out of the breadcrumbs, hand-in-hand with the certification authorities.

Seriously, years ago I supervised the deployment of a less secure video conferencing option because the more secure was not compliant to ISO-whatever-crap. So that's it... a classic joke cloud stack is compliant and you can get liability coverage on it but a simple BSD cluster with only port 443 exposed to the world is a disaster in the making, archaic, insecure, barbaric.

[Shiunbird]

And the circus continues...

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07...ce-makers/

Seriously, I just... can't.......... the day I can't browse the web securely anymore with my current devices will be the day I revert to going to the bank in person.

[commodorejohn]

*sad trombone*