Windows 10 China Government Edition | Hacker News Reader

Windows 10 China Government Edition

blogs.windows.com

54 points5ESS34 comments

> The Windows 10 China Government Edition is based on Windows 10 Enterprise Edition, which already includes many of the security, identity, deployment, and manageability features governments and enterprises need. The China Government Edition will use these manageability features to remove features that are not needed by Chinese government employees like OneDrive, to manage all telemetry and updates, and to enable the government to use its own encryption algorithms within its computer systems.

That almost sounds like windows that isn't spyware

I think that at this point in time this is a contradiction in terms. I'm sure someone at CIA has wet pants knowing that the chinese government buys windows.

Do they have an English version of it? I could really use something without half of the crap they try to push on me. Yeah, fuck you Cortana.

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, if you can swing the volume licensing requirement.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/l...

It’s the EnterpriseG SKU.

So Chinese government gets a version of Windows that works for the customer instead of for Microsoft... why can't we all get that option?

You used to be able to (Windows 10 LTSC), but they discontinued it

They didn't discontinue it.

No but all the "for the customer" features are gone. Current LTSC is just as bad as mainline. Just frozen in time with long security updates.

The ability to manage/disable features is meaningless. Surely the chinese government controls the source code and ensures that any install is off of their source?

And tell me china isn't the only country getting their own version. Russia, India, etc all have to be competent enough not to trust microsoft?

We declared kaspersky, an antivirus software company, as a national security risk. Surely the leaders of the world are smart enough to realize that if a mere little antivirus program is a national security risk, then an operating system is an even greater one. And yet, we never hear about other nations seriously ramping up investment in OS development. What is the EU doing? A larger economy and a larger population and nothing to show for it. Where is india and china? Surely with their large population then can spare a few engineers for OS development.

I would be very surprised if there is build infrastructure to build a full version of Windows outside of Microsoft.

It's not that hard apparently: https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-xp-leak-confirmed-afte...

The title could really use a (2017).

But I think it's a very interesting submission. At least I didn't know such a version of Windows 10 existed. I wonder if Microsoft would do such a project again in the current situation.

Yes exactly. In the past few years, it seems that prominent homegrown OSs have come up, eg: https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3075656/meet-chines...

Not a bad idea. I’m sure China has its own domestic threat model and maybe this provides some better protection against data encryption malware and whatever other annoying tricks hackers are trying.

Does china have its own desktop OS though? I’d imagine that they have a pretty good domestically designed one.

> Does china have its own desktop OS though?

Red Flag? [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux

sounds like a red flag

I’m not sure what to take away from this news but at first I thought it was some sort of meme :0

Published "May 23, 2017"

I'm not sure why this hit the HN front page?

Because there was a discussion about a stripped windows 10 iso yesterday with a link to the China Government Edition. It's the Hackernews cycle of lazy ass karma farming.

If something interesting is emerging from the comments, the one taking the time to post it on HN deserves the karma points. Thanks OP for this link!

Yeah, thanks op! /s

Are you new to HN? It's absolutely normal and OK for older articles to be reposted.

I thought at first this is a joke, but no.

It should be called the Windows 10 Spy Edition - removing/replacing crypto so it can be decrypted by the government...

Something like this should get a lot more attention and Satya Nadella should clarify why they support this?

More like windows 10 were not spying edition. Probably the only one Microsoft doesn't have insight into what youre doing on it. China has access to their source code.

It probably spies even more than regular windows 10, it just reports the results to someone else.

Windows 10 Russia Edition soon?

This is nothing new. Apple does (or rather, did) the same thing, by making versions of MacOS/iOS that funnel data directly to the CCP and utilize domestically owned and controlled servers. Unfortunately, catering to China seems to be the norm in this space.

Do they (Microsoft/Apple/whoever) really have much of a choice? The alternative would likely be that their products end up banned if they don’t satisfy the government. Not really a China-specific problem either — strikes me that the same would be true in many countries.

I mean, they do have an option. Companies like Google, Netflix and parts of Amazon are completely unavailable in China. Their option is to not be complicit in data collection for their oppressive government, but greed and disrespect for user privacy usually triumphs.

Funnily, Google has gotten way more flak for China on here than MS because of Project Dragonfly, a little secret project that was testing the waters of going back in with search (that got squelched by their employees as soon as they found about it) while Bing has been fully accessible in China to this day

Google doesn't like collecting data for the Chinese government, but at the same time they collect everything they can get their hands on for their own benefit.

And let's not forget that the US government has access to Google's data. They just promise not to use it against US citizens, which is both a lie and not very helpful to let's say Europeans.

The US government has access to everyone's data, including (but not limited to) Apple, Microsoft and Amazon's data. This is not really a surprise.

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