alt Hacker NewsI understand BBC may not have the technical background to critically assess this approach, but whoever using Eudora (I loved it in 2001 btw) for security should get their credentials removed via King's order. Security through "obsolescence" is no different from security through obscurity - therefore, it doesn't work. Somebody not bothering to look for holes in your software doesn't mean they don't exist - in the age of Claude - I am pretty sure I can destroy your legacy software in minutes.
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> I understand BBC may not have the technical background...
This is BBC Future - the BBC's tech clickbait publisher - not BBC News.
BBC consists of the non-profit news bureau as well as at least a dozen for-profit clickbait and listicle publishers. BBC's ad-free mandate is only for the UK.
> in the age of Claude - I am pretty sure I can destroy your legacy software in minutes
Yep. One of our PortCos has unrestricted access to Anthropic and GPT models. With whitebox testing, it's trivial to identify vulns in legacy environments. With blackbox testing, it takes some effort but it doable with the right steering.
wait until you find out that a large percentage of operating system developers use mutt, alpine or mail.
I would be curious to know what kind of vulnerabilities the latest version of Eudora (7.1.0.9 I think) has. With how old it is (2006), surely there are several critical vulnerabilities, but all I could find when looking online is that an IMAP server or SMTP server can execute arbitrary code, which doesn't seem likely to cause a real problem, because I wouldn't expect Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. to use this trick.
The article links to a vulnerability from 1998, which I expect is already fixed in the versions of Eudora people still use.
I agree it would probably be easy for AI to find exploitable bugs though.