Ask HN: Is it dangerous to connect a PC that's been off for 10yrs to Internet?

XP has Internet Explorer and I tried this in a VM once, and 99% of sites didn't load because they used TLS 1.2/1.3 which IE doesn't have functionality for. But plaintext HTTP sites loaded fine.

I wouldn't use XP as a daily driver if that's what you intend. There's so many exploits that have piled up over the years that getting pwned is inevitable at some stage and the attack surface of XP is massive.

Is it safe to just connect to the WiFi and download e.g. Firefox, or it's better to get it using a Flash memory while still offline?

It would be interesting to know how quickly an unprotected computer would succumb to a virus these days. The only sources I found are quite old - from 2005[0] (20 minutes) and 2007[1] (8 seconds!).

[0]https://www.cbc.ca/news2/background/computer-security/

[1]https://www.informationweek.com/cyber-resilience/how-long-do...

We have a machine running Win7 that's just about that age at home, mostly for the sake of keeping old passion projects that rely on heap behavior being deterministic like some forensics plugins and a half baked try at application checkpointing for Windows- despite that meaning a wider attack surface for Win7 (like LFH buffer overflows or use-after-frees), there aren't that many major threats to be wary of especially if an eye is kept at ProcMon then and now, plus maybe a network packet analysis tool of choice with some rules on (anecdotally, said workstation still sees reckless unprotected use from relatives and it's just fine haha). XP on the other hand needs more precaution and it might be better off kept offline or replaced with a lightweight Linux distro like Lubuntu :)

Use a hotspot so it doesn't affect your local network.

Or just wipe it by installing linux on it lol.