HMS Queen Elizabeth - myths and facts

Many of those people who pay any attention to the facts about the defence of the UK have started to get rather irritated about the number of myths floating around about the UK's new supercarriers, the first of which, HMS Queen Elizabeth, left Rosyth for her sea trials yesterday.

Yes, the carriers will have aircraft and will start their air trials next year.

The UK Defence Review refutes here the suggestion in the media that the new warships will be dependent on Windows XP. The Ministry of Defence has stated that

“The MoD can confirm that Windows XP will not be used by any onboard system when the ship becomes operational, this also applies to HMS Prince of Wales.”

Apparently the suggestion to the contrary originated when a documentary about the construction of the carriers showed a laptop, not part of the ship's inventor but owned by one of the engineers building the vessel, which was displaying a comedy wallpaper giving the impression it was running on XP.

I suppose the silver lining to the cloud of nonsense about the ships is that it might have led thousands of hackers from certain countries not very friendly to Britain to waste their time attempting to find Windows XP backdoors into the ship's systems, time which they might otherwise have used to do some real damage ...

Comments

Jim said…
Have to agree here, the less that people know about how the ship works, the better. Thats true in a lot of circumsances. I dont really care how the uk can detect a threat, as long as I am reasonably sure we can. Also if an embedded windows xp based system is the best way to make a goal keeper gun quickly say "left a bit, up, nail it" then what is wrong with that?

Control systems are there to serve a specific function, the fact that you cant play GTA 15 on it is neither here nor there. This is a war ship, its been designed as a war ship, and I would like to think its defence systems are not connected to the internet. Much like i dont want my car engine management system to be browsing facebook
5:11 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
Very good point, Jim
10:28 pm
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