In the run up to Barack Obama’s annual State of the Union Address to the US congress the official White House web site has put a video online where the Senior Advisor to the President, David Plouffe talks about it and explains the process behind it. NeoWin however have spotted an interesting process taking place behind him with the default Windows XP screensaver logo appearing on his computer monitor.
So why is this important and why should we care? We all know that the business that goes on within the White House is some of the most important and secret to take place anywhere in the world, and that there are classified documents on the computers of the White House and the Pentagon covering all manner of subjects that the world should probably never see (wikileaks and other public interest aside obviously).
We also know though not only that Windows XP is very close now to the end of all support, it is already out of mainstream support so will no longer be updated with service packs and updates, but in two years it will be out of all security support altogether. It is also the most insecure version of Windows currently still in use. Not only because of a complete lack of User Account Control or any Unix-type security, but because of the default web browser, Internet Explorer 6, which both Microsoft and major web giants have been trying to kill for years.
It matters then that major security and governmental establishments shouldn’t be using something as insecure as this and that they should be moving to either a more up to date version of Windows, such as Windows 7 which is considered by some security experts to be at least as secure as Mac OS X, if not more so, or to a different and more secure operating system altogether.
I’ll let you decide how important you think this is but NeoWin cite a Gartner group reports from late last year which said…
With support for Windows XP ending in April 2014, we believe it would be dangerous for organizations now running XP to attempt to skip Windows 7 and move directly to Windows 8. Organizations running Windows XP and working on Windows 7 migrations: Continue as planned; do not switch to Windows 8.
We can only hope the White House is already migrating to Windows 7 and that they don’t leave it too long to make the change completely.
