this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
1206 points (97.6% liked)

Games

38929 readers
742 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Rules

1. Submissions have to be related to games

Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.

This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.

2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.

We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.

3. No excessive self-promotion

Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.

This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.

4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.

We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.

5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.

No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.

6. No linking to piracy

Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.

We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.

Authorized Regular Threads

Related communities

PM a mod to add your own

Video games

Generic

Help and suggestions

By platform

By type

By games

Language specific

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] ericatty@infosec.pub 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure all personal data leaks to me and my friends and family have nothing to do with personal EOL OS on personal PCs/laptops.

My Dad, ran Windows 7 (yes, 7) until he passed last year, almost 80. We had his credit locked down, we had antivirus running, we kept the browsers up to date, and he was very good about not clicking weird links or calling fake support numbers.

His biggest data breach (and ours too)? Was from myChart a couple years ago, he got a letter that his data was part of the big hack, yada yada yada free credit reporting - so sorry. If you don't know, myChart is like The Main medical everything portal in the US at least for most doctors and hospital systems. So all your test results, making appointments, sending messages, requesting Rx refills, all through myChart's website. The hospitals and doctors using MyChart can see pretty much everything in your myChart health record (some exceptions)

So using super secure OS on your personal computer means nothing when you are part of a hundreds of millions data dump from someone hacking into that. Not having an account just means you don't have access to your own records, they are still part of the system.

But Yes, I was in the process of getting Dad an upgrade to a flavor of Linux that would be the closest to what he was used to. And the only reason was because browser support was coming to EOL for Windows 7. He really didn't want to change or lose his solitaire games and he deserved a stress-free life to play his damn games like he wanted.

THAT SAID - if businesses are using EOL OS and getting hacked - they definitely need to do whatever they need to do and protect their customer data. But EOL OS for an average person checking email, making doctor's appointments, checking headlines, and playing solitaire while streaming music certainly doesn't call for a need to panic.

IF you are a power user doing sometimes sketch things (according to Apple/MS anyway) probably switch to Linux sooner than later.

We have computers running Linux, Windows 10 (one of which was on 8.1 until a year ago), and Windows 11 in our house. The one on 11 is being tested basically, and will probably be reinstalled with Linux. But we are trying to give it a shot.

[โ€“] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

Your dad probably got lucky, and your router's firewall probably did a lot of the heavy lifting. If you were to connect a win 2000/XP computer to the internet today without a firewall between, it would be compromised in minutes (there are loads of videos of people demoing this).

While I don't have proof that 7 would be the same, I strongly suspect it would be the same. 10 will get there soon too. Firewalls will stop most of the low hanging fruit, but an application that bridges connections through the firewall are that much more vulnerable to exploitations that won't be integrated by your running kernel.