The other day I was near an ATM. JUST nearby. I had been working on a Windows / DOS laptop and had been thinking over all that I needed to do once home. As it happened, I heard the guy start pushing keys on the ATM and heard the little ring error sound from Windows 98 FE. I turned and looked, just to validate sanity, and each keypress made that sound. Ok, I said to myself, why the hell would that be running 98? Then, immediately as I was turning around, another ATM across the street crashed to OS/2. I almost thought I died and went to some weird ass old OS world but after I came home I looked up if ATM's used this sorta stuff.
I happened to find that video and I started wondering.... Why the hell do we still have all this stuff on everything?
Take another branch: I started working on this laptop that I got from my grandmothers.
A Toshiba Satellite Pro 460CDX. If you're wondering its now my DOS machine with DOS 7.1 for compatibility sake.
So I am wondering if I should test and see what crashes NT so much? Why doesn't anyone actually look at this? It seems like looking at why and poking shit is a lot better than having my Debit number stolen.
And people give Microsoft shit for their endless backwards compatibility. Now you know why that is and has to be. Everyone should have some Win95 system arround. I love the old stuff.
What reasons would they have to upgrade? And if they upgrade, will they have to run new hardware? Would they have to upgrade the entire local or wide area network they are connected to? Would they have to worry about new intrusion methods and eat the cost of pentesting? Do these systems not do the job they were intended to do? Why spend the time and money on upgrading when the systems in place now are working and secure?
But then you are completely liable when something malicious does occur. At least with a third party you have someone else to point the finger at. Insurance companies love that. ;P
Old M$ can be found in the most horrible places. I once had an air plane Entertainment System crash to windows ce! It honestly surprises me that those atms dont run linux or bsd
Theres a good reason to run CE TBH. NT is so fucked up there that if you COULD hack it, there wouldn't be a point. Unless CE talks to other CE systems and the CE host it freezes. I had a CE netbook in highschool I took notes on. I started playing with pentesting tools and found out that so much as pinging the system over standard IPV4 would drop it to DOS. Its not a useable shell either. Theres just nothing there. Honestly if I like any windows I like embedded windows. It has its charm in that the fact that theres nothing there makes it secure.
98, 95, DOS 7.1, etc concerns me because there IS something there. You can do a SHIT LOAD more on a DOS system like that than with a CE system. CE is like concrete, you put it in and once it is set you can't fuck with it; the system is so poorly designed that you can't do anything to it. Add length to a wire on an ATM for a scam card reader? The machine won't work because it isn't interfacing DIRECTLY with its own reader. Its interfacing with a reader that doesn't work with a 34 mhz MIPS chip by default and it doesn't know what its looking at and passthrough doesn't work worth a shit either. The system crashes or just calls for mom and turns off. Its kinda cute actually in an AI sense, but I would feel a lot better if all ATM's were CE.
