“That’s it. That’s where all these stories can trace their origin to. These few paragraphs do not say that Southwest is still using ancient Windows versions; it just states that the systems they developed internally, SkySolver and Crew Web Access, look ‘historic like they were designed on Windows 95’.”
https://www.osnews.com/story/140301/no-southwest-airlines-is...
I am not claiming that they run Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 ... but rather "this is where that story was sourced from" because everyone kept linking to somewhere else. The relevant XKCD is https://xkcd.com/978/
Essentially modern versions of Soviet-style disinformation campaigns, but augmented with new technology (social media), and without the ideological hindrances of a Communist government (e.g. sell hard to both Right and Left).
RAND Corp calls it "the Russian Firehose" model: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
Similar approaches are also used by NK, Indian, Chinese, and other national-tier disinfo campaigns. This contrasts with models used by the West, which are often less about creating a disinformation clusterfuck, and more of a "watch our Disney / BBC / Scandinavian TV & movies and their implied messages about freedom and human rights and shit".
Obiously Russian, Chinese, and all other governments engage in information campaigns, and obviously the US government knows a lot about what they are. But we the public does not necessarily have the same information. It's not really possible to distinguish the "well known and documented (by the military and espionage industrial complex)" operation of foreign countries from domestic propaganda developed by those corporations and agencies to influence their own citizens.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/windows-31-sav...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedreed/2024/07/20/meltdown-wha...
> A story on the website govtech.com on Friday asked the question, “Why isn’t Southwest affected by the CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage?
> “That’s because major portions of the airline’s computer systems are still using Windows 3.1, a 32-year-old version of Microsoft’s computer operating software,” the website said. “It’s so old that the CrowdStrike issue doesn’t affect it so Southwest is still operating as normal. It’s typically not a good idea to wait so long to update, but in this one instance Southwest has done itself a favor.”
The govetech.com article is https://www.govtech.com/question-of-the-day/why-isnt-southwe...
which linked to https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/southwest-cloudstrik...
which linked to an earlier Forbes article - https://www.forbes.com/sites/hershshefrin/2022/12/31/can-sou...
> The December 2022 scheduling fiasco was the result of skimping on information technology. I am old enough to remember when Microsoft introduced a new operating system called Windows 95, to replace its predecessor operating system Windows 3.1. The 95 in Windows 95 refers to the year of its introduction: 1995. By some accounts, major portions of Southwest’s scheduling system for pilots and flight attendants is built on the Windows 95 platform. That platform is now more than 25 years old.