FranceBB

I know, but Telegram doesn't support group calls that's why we created it on Skype years ago. When Telegram will support group calls, then we'll move to Telegram.

Good idea; I can make it execute the command whenever my VPN connection drops.

That's because it's still a work in progress. It takes time, especially since Microsoft is a closed source oriented company and everything has to be guessed by disassembled lines of code of their own executables and libraries with potentially a lot of errors and no documentation whatsoever.

Hi there! I'm gonna be in Italy for the next month or so and I'm gonna be using random wifi networks as I travel with my laptop, that's why I'm gonna use a VPN. I already have a contract with a VPN provider and it works fine as it has every protocol I want, from the most recent one to the very oldest one. As a matter of fact, going out and about with a computer running Windows XP using random free public Wi-Fi hotspots of various train stations in late 2019 isn't exactly the safest thing in the world and even though Avast Premier is definitely gonna do its job, I wanted to make sure to be protected, which is why I'm using a VPN and I want it to be constantly connected. On my laptop I have a triple boot with Fedora, Windows 10 and Windows XP thanks to GRUB which allowed me to chainload them all. Anyway, long story short, on Fedora I set up UFW (the built in Linux Firewall) to block all connections except for the IPs of the VPN servers I specified with the port I specified; this way, if the connection drops, all the traffic is gonna be blocked as well. I tested it and it works like a charm. On Windows 10, I have the official client of my VPN Provider which also has an internet kill switch option, which works fine. Anyway, I don't really use Win10 for anything but work-related stuff as I like to keep it clean and with only work-related things 'cause I hate it and I don't wanna use it as my daily OS. On Windows XP... Well... there's no client as it doesn't support XP (of course), so I set up the connection using the built in XP connection manager and I managed to connect to the VPN with an extremely vintage Dial-up-like window. Even though PPTP is very old and it's deprecated, I decided to connect to the VPN server using that protocol as I didn't manage to get L2TP working. Anyway, that's not a big deal; I mean, I'm not dealing with military-grade secrets here... (or am I? hahaha). Anyway, I disabled the idle time disconnection with this command: net config server /autodisconnect:-1 , I clicked on "redial" in order to re-connect if the connection drops and I set the amount of seconds between each retry to 1 sec and the number of retries to 9999999. (By the way, it's funny how it says "redial" instead of "reconnect" as the window was originally created with telephone numbers in mind back when dial-up was still a thing). I tried to simulate a few internet drops and it works, I mean, it does reconnect as quickly as it can, but my question is: is this enough? I mean, is there a way to make sure that I'm not gonna leak anything? Like making an internet kill switch I made on Fedora that blocks all but the selected ip addresses and ports? It seems that the default windows firewall is not up to the task nor is the Avast Premier Firewall, so... is there something I can do? This is how my connection looks like right now: Any idea? Thank you in advance, Frank

Well, it's been working for 19 years and it's still doing its job, why should they change it? XD

CTF is part of the Windows Text Services Framework (TSF), the system that manages the text shown inside Windows and Windows programmes. When users start a programme, Windows also starts a CTF client for that programme. The CTF client receives instructions from a CTF server about the OS system language and the keyboard input methods. If the OS input method changes from one language to another, then the CTF server notifies all CTF clients, who then change the language in each Windows programme accordingly, and in real-time. So far so good, but there's a problem: the communications between CTF clients and the CTF servers aren't properly authenticated or secured (I.e there's no access control in CTF). This is what Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher of the Google's Project Zero elite security team, had to say about this: "Any application, any user - even sandboxed processes - can connect to any CTF session. Clients are expected to report their thread id, process id and HWND, but there is no authentication involved and you can simply lie." "So you could connect to another user's active session and take over any application, or wait for an Administrator to login and compromise their session." And this is what Catalin Cinpanu (security expert) had to say: "An attacker that hijacks another app's CTF session can then send commands to that app, posing as the server -- normally expected to be the Windows OS." "Attackers can use this loophole to either steal data from other apps, or they can use it to issue commands in the name of those apps." "If the apps run with high-privileges, then those actions can even allow the attacker to take full control over a victim's computer." Now, I know what you're thinking "what if we disable it?" and... well... I don't really think we can, in fact, because of CTF's role (to show text inside ANY programme or service) there's a CTF session for literally everything and every user interface element on XP... Sure, antivirus softwares like Avast can try to prevent threats from getting to the computer, but what about those threats that haven't been discovered yet? Well, that's a problem. Besides, it's very unlikely that we're gonna get any update for XP/WES/POSReady at this point, so I assume that the vulnerability is gonna stay there and this is a pretty big one, I think, so... what are we gonna do now? Hope and pray for Microsoft to care enough about good old XP users and release a patch? Link to Google project zero where I read about it: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/down-rabbit-hole.html?m=1 Side note: this is a thing I would generally write inside the POSReady 2009 update topic, but I feel like it has become way too big and since support is officially over and we're unlikely going to see any new update, I didn't want to bring it up again, but... if you feel like it should be inside that topic, feel free to move it and merge it, Dencorso.

It's too damn hot over here... I do have a fan, which is spinning at the maximum speed, but it becomes pretty much useless when outside there's 40°C and inside my house there's 37°C. You know, turning the fan on is like getting hot air from a giant hair dryer. I even had to downclock and downvolt my CPU a bit otherwise it was going to overheat for very simple task. Thanks God I do have air conditioning at work.

Every time I see this topic active with someone that replies, I quickly open it 'cause I keep thinking that someone will find the KB numbers of post-EoS updates and will post the names here so that we can download them... Will this ever happen, at this point, I wonder...? 15k per year might be less than what the Navy spends on toilet paper and just a few bucks for governments and companies, but it's way more than what I'm willing to spend to keep my XP updated, so... c'mon people, we're still waiting for a "hero"... (Out of curiosity, if Microsoft was willing to put past EoS updates available for private users as well for something reasonable like 100 bucks per year, I would have happily bought it and I think many other people would have done the same).

Hats off, Dave, you are the Windows XP Spotter of the year. XD

I have no idea, but I think they'll probably use an FTP or Aspera or something like CloudConnect and so on. Like, professional file exchanging platforms. Anyway, that's just my assumption.

Microsoft is still patching XP/ WES / POSReady 2009 x86 and they are releasing updates on Microsoft Updates. Links are then shared with companies that are paying for the premium support 15k bucks per year. For instance, the navy said that they kept buying the premium support because they do have machines running XP and that 15k was less than what they spend for toilet paper on all their facilities. Other governments and private companies bought the premium support as well. Unfortunately, those updates are not indexed on the catalogue and we don't even know which KB number they are gonna get, so we can't access them, however if we knew about the number, downloading them would be as easy as manually writing down the link to Microsoft Updates / name of the sub folder which is named after the month and the year / KB with the code of the KB. I still hope that a hero will pop out and tell us the name of the KBs, just the names, and save us all.

No problem, I think I can fix that, but since it's been a while I think it might be time to make a new build of a newer version. If I'll have time I'll try to do it within the next few days. (If I have time). T_T

Probably yes. All we need now is a "hero" who has a Premium Support contract and is willing to... well... do what it needs to be done (you know what I mean).

We are all well aware of the mess WannaCry caused, yet it was mostly due to unpatched Win7 machines, not the ones running Windows XP, so here we are, years apart, with computers running Windows XP. We can see the programme opened in which the doctor was filling the forms and the obvious bar at the very bottom showing that it's Windows XP (no POSReady or whatever, plain XP). I wonder whether these machines are patched or not... (If you are wondering what that medicine is, it's something to encourage you to p*** and it's not for me. I was "lucky", though, 'cause another doctor asked the one I was talking to a consultation and as soon as she walked out of the room I took the chance to take a picture of the screen. When she came back, she suspected nothing).

That's great!! :D Thank you very much indeed harkaz, I was looking forward to archive it. :)

A big fat thank you, Microsoft! So you do love us, after all. Why am I thanking Microsoft? Well, it's because contrary to what they said in 2018 and reiterated in 2019, they have released the new Microsoft C++ Redistributable 2019 x86 and guess what? They are XP-Compatible. This is a very good news as it means that programmes compiled with Visual Studio 2019 will be able to run on XP without targeting the old deprecated v141_xp but using the new one. Thank you, Microsoft, thank you!! https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads

Mine it's correctly closed.

I wanna tell you something that happened to me. I have a network populated by Windows XP machines, all patched and with Avast and they are all connected to internet and they use it on a daily basis for any sort of stuff. There are other machines in the network that are running other OS like Fedora Linux with Nod32 antivirus and Android with Avast as well. Last but not least, there are virtual machines with Win10, Win98 and other versions of Windows for testing purposes, but they are not accessible from the outside world. Recently we decided to setup a test bench in bare metal, running Windows Server 2019 and connect it to internet and the outside world. We've got an email from the ISP stating that one of our machines has probably been compromised as it has been used in an attack. Later on, we found out that the attacker managed to get access to the machine by using a vulnerability in the RDP protocol of Windows Server 2019. The machine had all the latest updates installed, but no antivirus or firewall other than the default Microsoft ones (it was a test bench after all). It's funny how someone who attacked a network full of Windows XP machines just ignored them, went straight to the one running Windows Server 2019 and managed to compromise it... It surely makes you think...

He's gonna see whether you are a Winnie the Pooh fan and judge you. xD https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-winnie-the-pooh-film-to-stop-comparisons-to-president-xi

Yep, in Windows XP Professional is there:

When I installed it from the official page. I expected to find the Google account login option, but it prompted me to the 360 account instead. This way it's impossible for me to sync my bookmarks, autofill and passwords across browsers and since I have no intention to install 360 on my mobile as well nor to register for an account, I'm not gonna use it.

I contacted him and he replied. Please note that his very first release release is expected to run on Windows 7 and above as it's just a test, so it will not on XP and Vista as there are many missing kernel calls. Even by linking it to our modified kernel there are still QueryThreadCycleTime, SHGetKnownFolderPath, SetProcessDPIAware, and an API API-MS-WIN-CORE-SYNCH-L1-1-0.DLL which makes use of OpenProcess which will prevent it to run on XP. I sent to him our code stored on GitHub and some of our compiled binaries, although I didn't send the compiled version of Chromium yet, but he'll be able to access it soon as I'm gonna add him to the Windows XP Forever group. C'mon guys, let's make this flipping browser run! EDIT: On an unrelated note, I'm trying Chrome 360, but it's asking me for a 360 Account. Can't I just log in with my google account? Is there a way to link those two? EDIT: Some messages about the CPU and other stuff are still in Chinese. Is there a way to get them in English?

The invite link is invalid, however I'm gonna contact him via the advanced Chrome Forum. There's no reason to have two backported version of Chromium when we can have a joint project and share what we achieved. I'm gonna send him everything we have done as soon as I have the chance to have a word with him, then perhaps this time we will really have Chromium running on XP.

Because it can place an executable in the autorun folder in which resides links to programs that are gonna be opened at boot-time, then wait 'till you'll reboot and boom. Anyway, I'm still running my browser normally, but I think I'm gonna use the Avast Sandbox in the future.

Crap! You're right! It doesn't work anymore on Outlook365 2019 either! -.- I guess I'm gonna have to use New Moon to check my emails from now on...