The world's ATM machines will soon face a major issue on April 8th: The end of support for their operating system. According to BusinessWeek, 95 percent of active ATMs in the world, or nearly all of the 420,000 currently operating in the United States, run on Windows XP - a system which Microsoft is officially ending support for in under 90 days.
Why They not run Linux / Unix ? Why are they not a Cloud Terminal virtual machine?Also if they are all using XP then that has meant gov backdoor access has existed here and opens up interesting possibilities?
I bet allot of businesses as well. I'm in the transportation industry and most, if not all, are still rocking Xp. It's amazing to me that business computing always seem behind on technology. Old, antiquated computers, os, and most still use fax and paper copies to file data.
I guess it is expensive to hire someone to install and then teach newer systems in these businesses. I personally run my entire business off of my phone. I scan documents with the camera turning them into PDF and same with receipts. I use Evernote as a database and record keeping app and that is a cloud solution so even if my phone dies or gets lost I can retrieve my data. Still ever now and again I'll be forced to use fax which should be dead because business is still behind.
I don't think this is comparable to Y2K. This is a OS that will no longer receive updates or support so when a code genius hacker comes along and robs the banks there won't be a team fixing the known exploits.
Y2K was more or a misrepresented database issue that was easily fixed with new code to represent the date.
A better analogy would be using a car that they no longer make parts for. Eventually the car will break and fixing it will be way harder without parts.
Not that the extra year will actually get more people to update. Really, this means more will delay another year because they're continuing to get support.
I'd be more worried about 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038. 32-bit Epoch Time rolls over then, and given how widespread *nix systems are, there may be some systems that haven't been updated to fix this issue.