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Comment by hulitu | Hacker News Reader

> Due to GitHub upcoming lack of support to Windows7/8 action runners, this will be our last release officially supporting those platforms. As they have been unsupported for years by Microsoft, we recommend you upgrade to play OpenRCT2 for security reasons!

Those "security reasons" start more and more to look like "think of the children". The biggest entry point for exploits nowadays is the web browser, yet nobody cares about it (just look at the list of CVEs fixed at every browser release).

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There actually used to be a time using outdated browsers was a massive issue. The thing is that portion of the problem is solved now, every browser auto updates at an extremely high pace and it has become accepted. Auto update of evergreen operating systems is still extremely unpopular and occurs at a much lower pace. All things involved have massive piles of CVEs getting fixed all the time, it's still an improvement to consume them.

Where are all the stories of these Windows 7 users getting hacked due to memory corruption CVEs or whatever? Whenever I hear hacking stories nowadays, it's from simple password reuse or SIM-swapping, stuff like that. Or Ransomware, sometimes, but you can counteract that with backups.

You might say, well the stories aren't there because of how many people upgrade their OS's nowadays, but apparently enough people are on Windows 7 to make a stink (rudely, unfortunately) when Dolphin dropped Windows 7 support. And we all know how bad the Android OS upgrade situation is.

The remaining Windows 7 users (at least the intentional ones) will loudly make a stink in various niches on occasion when they want to be heard but they individually have no reason to harass anyone about how they are still using Windows 7 if it turns out badly for them. And, honestly, the person who knows enough to be able to care about being attached to Windows 7 probably has better general understanding of security & attacks than the average non-tech aware user as well. That doesn't imply using Windows 7 is great security advice, it's just part of the selection bias of who cares to stay.

If you wait long enough much of the modern malware becomes incompatible though :D.

> The remaining Windows 7 users (at least the intentional ones) will loudly make a stink in various niches on occasion when they want to be heard but they individually have no reason to harass anyone about how they are still using Windows 7 if it turns out badly for them.

Yes, I want to be absolutely clear that I'm not defending this behavior! (Really, there is no reason to harass anyone ever.)

> And, honestly, the person who knows enough to be able to care about being attached to Windows 7 probably has better general understanding of security & attacks than the average non-tech aware user as well.

I agree but that's why I find a lot of the messaging about "we're dropping X for your own good" to be really frustrating.

Again, to be clear, if they want to drop it that's their prerogative. Just don't claim you're doing it to protect people.

Analogous to this: if you drop OS support, please don't be hostile about it. This includes: please document the removal and the last working version, please don't autoupdate the working version to a version that won't run with no way to disable the autoupdater, and please don't go out of your way to sabotage forks that add back support. I'm not familiar with legacy Windows but I'm extremely familiar with legacy macOS, and there are specific apps which have done these things, often in the name of protecting people.

(And even if the developer is hostile, that's still not a reason to harass them, just to say that again.)

It only sounds like propaganda to the ones intentionally & knowingly staying who, in turn, only become the majority once the average users have already been pushed off by such things. In net, dropping official support claims for unpatched targets is a good even if it annoys users who already understand the situation clearly. But yeah, nobody should be going into someone else's computer and force deleting an app "for their own good" or something - that'd be pretty hostile.

And, again, it's only just part of a joke here. The entire debate about how a subset of Windows 7 users could be annoyed if it had really pushed this support reasoning message seriously is all theoretical from the comments section. It's exactly the type of "a minority of users might get really worked up about any perceived sleight around the topic" kind of thing one finds in this area - you can't even make a joke involving it being a better reason than playing a game without resulting in discussion and someone technical bringing up how hostile it is to make such a mention.

On the website, their joke has some formatting: “we recommend you upgrade <strikethrough>to play OpenRCT2</strikethrough> for security reasons!”

If that is supposed to be sarcasm, I didn't get it.

I think it’s throwing shade on Microsoft, which is urging people to upgrade to W11 for “security reasons.”

Since Microsoft owns GitHub, their decision to shut down Windows 7/8 action runners is a sneaky way to help drive customers toward Windows 11.

While I agree that there are lots of problems around security communication, I don't feel like the number of CVEs fixed is a good proxy for bad security, I would assume it's more the opposite. Like the more incident reports an airline company has, the safer it tends to be - the unsafe ones don't care to file them.

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