keenmaster486 wrote on 2020-01-27, 01:07:

I'm posting from MS-DOS right now.

How fun is this!

How the f... is this possible? I want a guide! Hahahaha

Lynx, my friend.
http://www.rahul.net/dkaufman/

Lynx, yes, but what I was using was actually Links!

dr_st wrote on 2020-01-23, 17:21:

That's exactly the thing. In the private sector, nobody, and I mean nobody, has systems connected directly to the internet without at least a NAT router. And if you are the one in a hundred (or in a thousand) that has only one machine, no LAN, no router - then that machine, being your primary machine, better run a modern OS for reasons that have more to do with usability than security.

Nobody? Everyone with IPv6 (still a small but quite definitely nonzero percentage) is directly on the internet with public IP addresses on every device inside the home. Now, that's not so relevant for vintage stuff as IPv6 is only from 1999 and doesn't have native support in anything before Windows XP (and even there it's patchy at best). But it's a good example of the kind of assumption that leads to errors.

Providers operating IPv6 have firewalls on their modem/routers with default deny-all policy on incoming IPv6 connections to everything within the prefix delegated to the LAN, which de-facto offers a similar level of 'protection' to a NAT router: the front door is shut, but absolutely no protection to anything outgoing from compromized machines. That should also be enough for unpatched devices in the home, so long as they are 'clean' to start with and only connect to trusted resources online.

That said, I fully agree with the point that you don't want to do anything critical on this sort of machine anyway. If my DOS machine running mTCP stuff somehow gets into trouble... so what? Absolute worst case I need to re-flash the BIOS in an external flasher, wipe out the boot sectors using a recent, patched Linux and copy a DOS install back onto whatever device I cleaned. I'm also not too concerned about what it might get up to on my LAN or using my connection - these systems are powered down whenever not in use and ISA bandwidth is significantly less than my internet connection upload bandwidth (let alone my 500Mbps download), so I wish anyone wanting to do bad stuff a lot of luck with that 😉

dionb wrote on 2020-01-27, 11:46:

Nobody? Everyone with IPv6 (still a small but quite definitely nonzero percentage) is directly on the internet with public IP addresses on every device inside the home.

I'm not entirely sure it's true, but maybe you are right. I think it depends a lot on the ISP.

dionb wrote on 2020-01-27, 11:46:

Providers operating IPv6 have firewalls on their modem/routers with default deny-all policy on incoming IPv6 connections to everything within the prefix delegated to the LAN, which de-facto offers a similar level of 'protection' to a NAT router: the front door is shut, but absolutely no protection to anything outgoing from compromized machines. That should also be enough for unpatched devices in the home, so long as they are 'clean' to start with and only connect to trusted resources online.

Well, then it's kinda the same as having a standard IPv4 NAT router. Except it's not under your control. But I think you can configure your local router to do IPv6 NAT anyways.

Adguard on macOS is amazing. I am using the extension with MS Edge, and so far the thing tells me that it had blocked more than 500 threats so far... in 1 hour of usage (I'll admit that I was searching for something hard to find).

Bruninho wrote on 2020-01-23, 15:22:

All my computers run behind a router, but these are modern OS. Older OS like Win 3.x or Win 9x I run only on virtual machines.

While I agree with the OP... but there is one way to get infected: How about the updates and other older software/games we download for our retro machines from sites that are not the ones who actually produced the software (which may be or not be actually abandonware, for example). These ones might have a virus.

There's another option, and that is visiting an old website that serves something that could harm your computer.

Back in the day quite a lot of malware infections on Windows happened via (animated) web ads or regular websites with a payload that popped up fake Windows error screens - click it and you get infected. Some of them basically hijacked your browser and modified their settings in such a way that you could not close the browser window, or got an avalanche of pop-up windows where closing one window caused x new ones to spawn.

Of course this was mostly prevalent on Internet Explorer, and only somewhat less on Netscape and (later) Firefox. Old Opera on maximum nuisance-prevention settings was pretty immune to it.

Then there's the Flash problem...which you can better just not install as each version has tons of security issues, no matter the OS.

One vintage platform that I would feel safe on while browsing the modern internet are PowerPC Mac OS X machines. The different (non-x86) architecture was always pretty safe because it did not have a large enough user base for malware-developers, and the malware that does exist is laughably bad (i.e. it requires manual execution by the user and the user typing in their admin password to do harm).
A Windows PC from the same vintage...not so much, unless it's behind a modern firewall.

I'm quite happy with the fact that Win 2k + BWC is enough to let me run a more "modern" browser (SeaMonkey and New Moon), almost everything works - even YouTube works, I just watched the trailer for 007 - No Time To Die.

But Windows 98... Retrozilla can still work with VOGONS, but YouTube and everything else is still pretty limited. I don't expect any miracle like the one above, anyway.

Bruninho wrote on 2020-01-23, 15:22:

While I agree with the OP... but there is one way to get infected: How about the updates and other older software/games we download for our retro machines from sites that are not the ones who actually produced the software (which may be or not be actually abandonware, for example). These ones might have a virus.

Sure, but you can still make sure that the files are safe using virustotal for example.
Actually I've had far more viruses from old floppy disks than from softs found on the internet (about 4-5 from 5"1/4 disks and 0 from the internet yet).

Also like many people mentioned, you don't put personal data on your retro pc anymore, so if it gets corrupted it's just a little bit annoying.
Now some people may try to use your retro pc as a backdoor to your home network, but unless you're somebody very important, I don't see why you'd get a targeted attack like this.

Also for IPv6, even if your computer is directly accessible from the internet, don't forget that your home network can have MANY more IPv6 addresses than all the ipv4 addresses that exist in the world. Scanning your network for vulnerable computers without hacking your router would require billions of years.

What was the public facing IP of that Win9x machine again?... I have some toys from back in the day... just ignore it when your machine starts acting weird. 😁

yawetaG wrote on 2020-01-29, 18:14:

Then there's the Flash problem...which you can better just not install as each version has tons of security issues, no matter the OS.

I've pretty much killed it (Flash) from all the machines I use regularly. I was never a fan of Flash, never. When I started my career as a web designer, I had a lot of hate for IE6 and in second place, Flash banners that were requested to be created. Thanks God for HTML5.

Bruninho wrote on 2020-02-11, 17:27:

yawetaG wrote on 2020-01-29, 18:14:

Then there's the Flash problem...which you can better just not install as each version has tons of security issues, no matter the OS.

I've pretty much killed it (Flash) from all the machines I use regularly. I was never a fan of Flash, never. When I started my career as a web designer, I had a lot of hate for IE6 and in second place, Flash banners that were requested to be created. Thanks God for HTML5.

I've never been a "fan" of Flash, either. But.. I HTML5 was or maybe still is even worse in some cases.
Whereas someone could still disable or block Flash to get rid of all the banners it's nolonger possible (in fact, some sites reverted to these animated GIF banners).
In esssence, all the quirks and dirty code shifted froma single Plug-In to the browser itself. Also, HTML5 support by itself is useless. It requires the help of other technologies.
CSS, JavaScript and Codecs on the Browser/Host side. Which brings us back tom the original issue.
ActionScript, as used by Flash, is kind of a sibling of JavaScript. Except JavaScript lacking some of the cool additions.
Anyway, I'm no "fan" of Flash. I'm just a bit of an observer. I remember when Flash 10.2 ("The Square" ?) came out about ten years ago and introduced
GPU-assisted drawing of vector graphics and acceleration of video. That did speed up older Flash animations and games quite a lot, if the GPU's driver supported it.
On Windows, a Geforce 8000/9000 series GPU was enough, I recall. HTML5, by comparison, was dog slow. And it lacked a standardized video codec, among other things.
Overall, also, websites quickly became simpler after HTML5 was accepted. They worked without Flash, but were as power hungry as Flash itself. Just uglier.
Another thing is the IDE. Flash had a very sophisticated IDE, with animation tools that were used by professional cartoonists, even.
On HTML5, you pretty much need to do all the work yourself by either using a text editor, as in the 90s, a DreamWeaver type of editor, NetObjects Fusion type of editor/web site builder.
Personally, I'm a bit dissappointed of the current situation. Everything is like an insular solution with pseudo-compatibility that's archived by going All-WebKit in the browser department.
When HTML5 was new, I wondered why the existing system wasn't simply being open sourced or re-engineered. Instead, they ruined HTML as markup language.
For instance, dropping the version number in the HTML tag is just plain silly.

Where I worked, we had a designer/cartoonist, and me.

All I had to do was to pick his images and find a way (ActionScript) to make them animate and react according to user interaction. Sometimes, it wasn't just a banner, it was a small simple mini game for advertsing or more complex, educational game, for example. I really hated Flash and the need of a script for it, preferring to do animated GIF banners.

I am not a fan of jQuery either, I prefer vanilla JavaScript, and I prefer to do very little JS, because I see them as a resource hog and unecessary in most cases. I am happy that Bootstrap is ditching jQuery to use vanilla JS, but there are cases where JS isn't even needed. I can give a few examples that can show how great HTML5 is.

Last week I had to do a modal, and load it in a situation where I couldn't load a JS together (don't ask me why, the LMS I was using simply couldn't let me do that) so I used some "black magic CSS" to load the modal which works for all browsers, even the old ones - the checkbox hack. I could've used the ":target" hack too, but that would require a little JS to make the browser history ignore it. Anyway, my trick works flawlessly and does not need JS. Although the checkbox hack isn't very clean or does not follow any standard, it works well for the purpose and works exactly like a JS solution I could have done. And it was a quicker solution.

Back to the Flash, HTML5's canvas can do the same job if not better, it just has to be well programmed, and to do that, just make it as simple as it can be. I'd say to use Flash as a fallback if you really wanted to cater for the older browsers, but frankly, don't. Especially in a moment where Flash is being killed for good this year. I had 2 good news this year so far - The death of IE11 and now Flash...

It seems that the talk today is all about the privacy on email clients. Certain email clients are selling your data.

Bruninho wrote on 2020-02-12, 15:29:

It seems that the talk today is all about the privacy on email clients. Certain email clients are selling your data.

Do you have a link for more info?

Currently the talks involve a few iOS third-party clients. Since I do not follow the crappy Android scene, I will not comment about them.

The focus is more on Edison mail app currently, but there may be others (no doubt).
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/pkekmb/fre … -slice-cleanfox

I personally prefer the native Mail app on macOS/iOS/iPadOS, and Outlook Mail on Windows. There are good third party options such as Spark mail.

I agree with OP. Several of my PC's I gave up on installing AV after they had stopped supporting the OS.

I tend to install an old version of a firewall however. But other than that I am free. The only virus's I have ever had were because I was looking for porn.
And these days with such professional porn websites (won't name them), you don't have to google 'porn' anymore...

I'll probably spread some FUD here.

Back in the last days of Windows XP, in 2008, I tried to use Windows 2000 on older computer.
It was conquered by network worms the same minute I connected it to the Internet via provider LAN cable, without a router, and became unusable.

So I installed some lightweight Linux distrubution and never tried connecting Windows 2000 to the Internet again.

kolmio wrote on 2023-11-04, 09:50:

Back in the last days of Windows XP, in 2008, I tried to use Windows 2000 on older computer.
It was conquered by network worms the same minute I connected it to the Internet via provider LAN cable, without a router, and became unusable.

Sure!
But note that the problem was very easy to avoid...

Basically, there are only two dangerous scenarios:
- putting the machine on a public IP address
- visiting hostile websites

Now, when connecting old computer to the net...
- it doesn't make sense to use public IP, almost always there's already some router with Network Address Translation
- visiting random websites doesn't make sense, either - usability of old systems on the modern Internet is pretty much limited to FTP, and the few websites designed especially for vintage clients

Modern viruses are currently being written under Windows 10 x64 in larger numbers, as well as under the .NET_FrameWork 4.5+ and much less often under Win7x64, well, Win7x32 is already generally exotic... On XP, most of them won't start at all, requiring you to upgrade first to at least Windows 7 or higher and try again. Well, 9x is practically not affected at all.

I have the ability to run any viruses on the Connectix VM in order to research their capabilities, and it's been a long time since I've seen anything that can even run under Win9x. All previously sensational high-profile names are not launched in 9x. If you are aware of modern, yet undetected viruses that run in 9x (I wonder what kind of crazy author will write a virus today under 9x) - write, I will be happy to test them.

If you suffer from paranoia and you dream of viruses, you can take the latest 9x compatible antivirus with the most recent databases and even a firewall. They contain in their databases everything that was released several decades ago and even more. In addition, you can get a LiveCD with the most up-to-date antivirus programs and perform periodic checks. Well, plus regular backup - our everything. But over time, you will realize that the danger is exaggerated, and the source of these myths is most likely the sales departments of new products (Completely leaky products, it is worth noting).