Richard Cunningham's posterous

Currently there is a lot of fuss being made about a fairly serious unpatched hole in the Microsoft Windows systems. The main thread of these stories is that Microsoft hasn't fixed the problem fast enough, given that you can get infected by just visiting a website using IE to visit a page or viewing a email with images in, this is understandable.

However according to Microsoft's current plans if this happens next year then XP Home users will be left out in the cold with no security fix ever, as the security fixes for XP Home are due to finish this year. Whilst it is likely that Microsoft will make an announcement later this year to extend the support a couple more years, this doesn't leave current new buyers of systems in a very good situation, if they choose a system running XP Home they run the risk of not having free updates in less than a year and even if the support gets extended by 2 years, they only have 3 years of use of the machine before they have to upgrade, which in my opinion isn't very long. What makes this even worse is that most buyers of home machines will completely unaware of this.

Update - Microsoft has either corrected this error or extended the support for XP depending on your point of view.