This seems largely to be about security by obscurity.

I was hoping it was gonna be about how our modern practices are making things less secure.

For instance, we claim we need to be able to rapidly update clients so that we can patch security vulnerabilities as they are discovered (often without involving the user at all). And there are a lot of companies that have an incentive to push this narrative because they have products which facilitate this whack-a-mole approach to security. But there's no reason to believe that new software is more secure than old software. Old software is just more likely to be known to be insecure. So anything written before it became trendy to update without your user's consent is more secure in at least one way because it is not configured to automatically update to whatever comes down the pipe from "the vendor".

Sadly, the real lesson we need to learn from Battlestar Galactica is not this. They weren't saved by old software, they were saved by not having critical systems on the network unnecessarily.

Our water and power utilities need to re-watch the pilot.

Makes it harder to catch you in a general sweep, but it probably makes it much easier if anyone decides to target you specifically. How good a tradeoff that is varies from person to person. And the difficulty of targeting a specific person is changing in an AI world. I wouldn't try to characterize it any farther than that, just to observe that it is changing. "Hey AI go individually research and target county clerks for getting direct access to their {specific system}" is much more practical today than it was 10 years ago, and will be even more so 10 years from now.

It's incredible how far back the surveillance state goes - GSM mobile phones have an IMEI number that's tied to the handset - and the SIM is tied to the subscriber, and your phone broadcasts imei to neighboring towers constantly.

I haven't really gotten really into this, but from what I can tell, anything that has to do with mobile phones is strictly worse in terms of anonimity than Wifi.

At least anything that ties a Wifi connection to you you can change in an OS setting, but if you get into faking IMEI/SIM stuff, that can very quickly get you charged with an actual crime.

> Interest in magnetic tape is only increasing further today because the cost of random access memory (Ram), a form of computer memory that doesn't rely on tape, is skyrocketing.

hmm

>But the team picked an older software version for their honeypot that had been upgraded multiple times since its release and, consequently, no hackers bothered to target it. "When we upgraded it to the new one, we had all the attacks we wanted," recalls Bishop. "I thought it was so amusing."

It feels like fantasy imo

While I could understand using outdated or not popular protocols, then software with known vulns seems crazy when we are living in world of automated, ai assisted scanners

Here is a good example where this is not so. Unfortunately, my datacenter runs this vulnerable VMS release on an emulated VAX.

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2018/02/06/ghost-in-the-...

I understand BBC may not have the technical background to critically assess this approach, but whoever using Eudora (I loved it in 2001 btw) for security should get their credentials removed via King's order. Security through "obsolescence" is no different from security through obscurity - therefore, it doesn't work. Somebody not bothering to look for holes in your software doesn't mean they don't exist - in the age of Claude - I am pretty sure I can destroy your legacy software in minutes.

Money defines the targets, and usually people running old software are thought not to have money. It is a zero sum game that shifts with the technology and ends when technology no longer is the theater where people can make or steal money.

I know someone who works at a data center for the IRS, and a lot of their records are all stored in PDFs. He thought it was disgusting when he first learned about it, but eventually realized that it's essentially resistant to a large scale data leak. Retrieval just isn't fast enough.

Daily reminder that connecting everything to the cloud was a terrible idea and should never have happened like it did.

This is terrible advice and I feel like this article will be used by managers of outdated IT systems to defend not upgrading their tech stack.

There are hospitals out there still running on windows XP. Someone's going to skim this article and say "look, we're actually being prudent"!

MS-DOS: Over 45 years, and STILL NO remote holes in the default install!