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BBC 198 kHz longwave closure date?
- Thread starter Mediafrog+
- Start date
It's on the list linked to by Mediafrog. Montague, California, running 50 watts.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
That makes two of us. Three, if you count KRKE's owner.
Make that four.
I still use a 2013 MacBook Pro because it still does what I want (albeit slowly), and I still use Windows 7 and XP on occasion to do things that newer versions are overkill for.
To be honest, I'd still be using my old 2009 MacBook Pro or my 2007 white plastic MacBook if I could!
Using older PCs is actually easier.
A few years ago (sometime around 2020 or 2021), I set up my old Pentium 4 PC with Windows 2000 and some open source projects that allow newer software (such as the then-current version of Firefox) to run on the old Windows version.
It was not fast, but it actually worked quite well for a then-18 year old PC running a then-20 year old operating system.
c
And here we see the difference between hobbyists and anyone who has to work with professional broadcast software for a living.
In my new professional life selling Myriad software, I've developed a keen understanding for why our company requires Win 10/11 to run our software.
It's already a challenge in a global company to make sure our software provides a consistent and consistently functional experience, 24/7/365, as a mission-critical piece of a radio station. We have to support a wide variety of audio cards and the underlying SQL database that powers our system in a variety of environments depending on what else is running on the same PC or server.
Our small but mighty support team has to be on constant alert for all the ways Microsoft messes with audio settings every time it sends out an update. That's doable when they're only keeping track of current Windows versions that still have MS support. It's an impossible task if they're also charged with keeping an obsolete Win 7 or XP environment functioning.
And that's all assuming the machine that's running 7 or XP is fully and properly air gapped from the public internet. Running either of those versions on anything exposed to the Internet is just begging for malware and infections, and once they get to one machine, they can spread to an entire network.
It's not a security risk any competent IT professional would take in any sort of business environment these days.
In my new professional life selling Myriad software, I've developed a keen understanding for why our company requires Win 10/11 to run our software.
It's already a challenge in a global company to make sure our software provides a consistent and consistently functional experience, 24/7/365, as a mission-critical piece of a radio station. We have to support a wide variety of audio cards and the underlying SQL database that powers our system in a variety of environments depending on what else is running on the same PC or server.
Our small but mighty support team has to be on constant alert for all the ways Microsoft messes with audio settings every time it sends out an update. That's doable when they're only keeping track of current Windows versions that still have MS support. It's an impossible task if they're also charged with keeping an obsolete Win 7 or XP environment functioning.
And that's all assuming the machine that's running 7 or XP is fully and properly air gapped from the public internet. Running either of those versions on anything exposed to the Internet is just begging for malware and infections, and once they get to one machine, they can spread to an entire network.
It's not a security risk any competent IT professional would take in any sort of business environment these days.
Is DIW from Dixon, NC still on the air? Caught that way more often on 198 kHz than BBC Radio 4.
Beacons below 200 kHz are now gone. You can check the link in my post #78 on this thread.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I can speak to how my PC is configured. It runs Win 7 Ultimate (which, as you know, is the 64-bit version). Believe it or not, despite Microsoft swearing up and down that they provide zero support for it, I still get regular database updates for Windows Defender; apparently they kept the malware database in the same format for subsequent versions.
I also scan the machine once a week with a second anti-malware program, just as a precaution.
I have both Windows Firewall and the firewall in my router enabled. I also know better than to click on e-mail attachments coming from anyone I don't know personally and were not expecting to receive. Not only do I laugh at the ineptness of most phishing attempts, I forward them all to the APWG.
And here's another thought that has occurred to me, Scott. Given that so many people buy into the "upgrade because we won't support the old version" that Microsoft has been exploiting for as long as there have been versions of Windows, I suspect the hackers have moved on to the challenge of the newer OS's and could not care less about machines running 7 or XP.
In fact, the only real problem I have is that too many websites are changing their HTML code to meet the new "security protocols" that only the latest and greatest versions of Windows will support, and I can no longer upgrade my version of Firefox to one that makes them happy.
I'm glad you're making money from all this, but I am incensed at the way us legacy users are being abandoned just because we won't play the game. I guarantee you that my machine is every bit as secure as one running Windows 11 -- because I know what I am doing and how to avoid being hacked into -- but try explaining that to the geniuses at Mozilla, who are brainwashed by Microsoft's BS. I already have to resort to downloading some of my financial statements via my phone, which I hate having to do because I consider it to be more vulnerable than my PC.
So thanks for the advice. I find it of little personal value, but maybe you'll keep someone who knows considerably less than I do from getting into trouble. Which would be a good thing.
What @fybush was explaining are best security practices, and any reputable corporate or educational environment will follow those practices, for better or worse, because that's the way things are.
Small businesses, freelancers and hobbyists, however, generally have some flexibility to run pretty much whatever they want, as long as it does what they need and they can keep it secured and maintained without too much fuss.
That said, I'm pretty much with you.
I also generally run Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate where I can, but I have bought a few Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC licenses (10 IoT E. LTSC is supported until 2032), to see if I could make it work.
It took some doing (did you know that elements of the traditional Classic theme still exist in even the latest versions of Windows 10 and 11? With the proper tweaks, one can make 10 look and feel almost identical to Windows XP or 7), but I did make it work (and as luck would have it, just as I got it working smoothly, the computer's motherboard died. Coincidence? I don't know).
So, I tried out the future, and I think I can live with it, but until I get that computer fixed or replaced, I'm stuck with my old 2nd-gen Intel-based backup, which really runs best on either XP or 7 (I'd run XP, but then most of the software I use wouldn't work because most of it dropped XP support years ago, if it ever had it to begin with).
I suppose I could try running 10 on it to see what would happen. Maybe it'd run better than I think....
c
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K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I probably could do likewise by creating a bootable partition (I have somewhere around 450GB of free space on my C: drive) but ... Win 7 Ultimate works so well on my machine!
And now, another edition of that popular game show "Quoting Out Of Sequence":
Of course, I expect Scott's advice to be more relevant to his business clients than to the individual user.
What I resent is -- to give two real-world examples -- Chase refusing to let me log in to my account because my browser version is "out of date" (because, as I said previously, I am using the last version of Firefox that is supported under Win 7) or Citi warning me about my browser every time I log on there ... which I take as a "warning" that they are about to "enhance" security soon as well.
After considerable thought, I think what I am most disappointed about is that these major financial institutions are unwilling to accommodate their personal account holders who either can't upgrade for technical reasons, can't afford to spend discretionary income to upgrade, or simply don't want to play along with Microsoft. IMNSHO, if they can detect that I have an "out-of-date" browser, they should be able to redirect me based on that detection to a version of the website that still supports it. After all, they had that HTML in place before they changed it ...
Heh! I'll try quoting you in sequence (this one notwithstanding, of course
)Same!
Installing it from scratch is getting tricky thanks to Windows Update not working out of the box, but it's still quite solid once past that block.
Yep.
What applies to corporations (and their employees) doesn't always apply to ordinary users, nor should it.
Agreed!
I was trying to download a copy of VMware Workstation the other day for my automation computer (before it died), and I had to log in, change my password to some highly secure but incomprehensible hash, sign a disclosure or something, and get through a reCAPTCHA just to download some stupid freeware.
We ordinary users don't need Top Secret, governmental levels of security for such mundane things!
Also Agreed!
I could go on, but you pretty much said it all!
Upon reflection, I do think the banks do deserve a small amount of slack, because when one is logging in to access their finances, it seems like they'd want that to be as secure as possible.
With that, I think the onus, then, is on Mozilla et al to keep their browsers up to date and functional on older systems for as long as is practical (in Apple Land, someone recently managed to backport the latest versions of Firefox, which only officially support MacOS 10.15 and up, to versions as old as 10.7; if an individual developer can do it as a hobby project, there's no reason at all why Mozilla can't do it themselves).
c
I read quite a few computer related forums, and I have yet to see a thread on those that veers into longwave radio.🤣
I once recommended configuring your Firefox installation to send a custom, modern User-Agent string to your banks' web sites, saying this often worked to get around many institutions' picky browser requirements. Only after you reported no success did I later discover that Firefox had unkindly removed that feature, stranding everyone in its user base who was dependent on per-site User-Agent switching.
If it interests you, after more Googling, I eventually found this short thread at Wilders Security, where that unkindness was being discussed. In it, someone finds and posts a link to a Firefox addon bringing back the ability to send custom User-Agent strings to specific sites. So if you want to give that old trick a second try, the addon link you need, and examples of how to configure it, are in that thread. And the currently-latest Firefox User-Agent string can of course still be found here.
Mind you that while this should finally make sending site-specific alternative User-Agent strings possible for you, there's still the chance that your banks examine more than just User-Agent strings to detect their visitors' browser versions. Again, most don't check more than that, but some particularly paranoid ones can also use browser fingerprinting, SSL fingerprinting, and other JavaScript tricks to determine client versions. In that case, you might investigate these open source projects where people are retromodding modern (i.e. the latest, or near-latest) versions of Chromium and Firefox so they once again run under XP, Vista, and 7:
Supermium (Ungoogled Chromium) for Windows XP and above (direct links: here, here):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsSMmdwh89Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VPJ-FCvGd0
Chromium for Windows 7 (direct link: here)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aukoov3ioqM
I also found out about this one today, but have not personally tested it yet:
r3dfox (modern Firefox) for Windows Vista and up:
https://github.com/Eclipse-Community/r3dfox
https://sourceforge.net/projects/r3dfox/
Supermium is extra-nifty because its compatibility extends clear back to XP. It also offers an "ungoogled" mode that lets you run it with lots of Google's cruft disabled.
Your only dilemma in using any of these would be whether you would trust them with banking sites -- the irony. They are all open source, and should be completely benign. But I have not read their source code for you, and can't make guarantees. My advice: try the User-Agent addon for your existing Firefox installation first. Otherwise, they can be wonderful to have around for general browsing, in cases where you encounter sites that refuse to work with Firefox's final ESR for Windows 7, or that want Chrome to play nice at all.
For any classic Mac people out there, I found this too:
PowerFox (modern Firefox that even works on a G4 Power Mac from 2001):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTCYA3Qa8YM
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K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Yes, and I appreciate your trying to help even as Mozilla did their utmost best at preventing people from using their browser as we see fit.
99.99% of what I do with Chase, et al, is download my statements every month. I consider the risk of someone intercepting paper statements in the mail to be greater than anyone deciding to hack my browser. (Especially since we have had a couple of instances of my building's mailboxes being forcibly open and the contents removed.)
And since (if any of those suggestions work and Mozilla hasn't read your post and decided "hey ... more ways to piss off our users!") I don't exactly have the hugest credit card bills in the universe, I'm probably not worth being hacked into in the first place.
I thank you again for your suggestions. If they don't work I will continue to not blame you.
Off air for several years now and the tower and transmitter site are gone.
There's also Momiji, for more recent Macs that, for one reason or another, aren't running 10.15 or newer: Link
I use it myself on my main computer, which is running MacOS 10.14 because my audio interface breaks under MacOS 11, and my DAW software breaks under MacOS 10.15. 10.14 is the sweet spot where it's not so old so as to be completely obsolete yet, but it's old enough where everything I use still works 100% as it should, except of course Firefox (for reasons unknown to all except them, they support only MacOS 10.15 and up).
Odds are if you find a classic computer related thread somewhere and I'm a participant, I could probably make that happen for you
c
Fortunately, some software has endured multiple Windows updates with no problem. I have used Microsoft Expression Web since its predecessors in the later 1990s. It was discontinued a decade or so ago, but released to the public domain.Yes, and I appreciate your trying to help even as Mozilla did their utmost best at preventing people from using their browser as we see fit.
I produce World Radio History in that environment, and have, still, found no reason to endure the learning curve of the Adobe product to get loads of features I do not need at a cost of about $500 a year!
(Yes, it creates obnoxious code, but users of the site don't look at the code... they look for issues of Billlboard and Broadcasting and the like.)
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I have a similar situation with my mail client, Eudora. Created by a visionary at the University of Illnois in 1987 for the Mac, it was acquired in 1991 by Qualcomm, who developed versions for Windows and IBM mainframes (!). Despite several upgrades (including a paid version starting in 1983, but not abandoning the free ad-based version) it lost popularity once Microsoft -- them again -- started bundling Outlook with Windows. The last release was in 2006, and Qualcomm put it in the public domain, including the source code.
Eudora worked fine until 2020, a when the Internet Message Access Protocols it had been using were deprecated in favor of ones that had been introduced during the previous decade. Eudora had continued to work using the older protocols, and as mail servers were upgraded over the next couple of years it was unable to connect to them.
Thankfully, a group of developers were able to modify the source code for the two components that no longer worked and offered them at no charge to existing users. In more recent years, a developer whose main business is large-scale e-mail software has been incrementally rebuilding Eudora to cope with further changes that affect it in less catastrophic but still important ways, and now I am on his list of Alpha version testers for the renamed Aurora (which still, for the moment, requires me to keep my old copy of Eudora installed in another folder, which isn't a big deal as it only takes 92MB of disk space, including the mailbox contents).
It keeps running, so I don't need a new learning curve for a new client.