China bans use of Windows 8 on government computers | Hacker News Reader

China bans use of Windows 8 on government computers

reuters.com

286 pointsyiedyie142 comments

Chinese here, would love to share some observations:

1) It's likely that the ban on Windows 8 has nothing to do with "power-saving". To me power-saving is just a buzzword in the title of the notice.

2) This notice is concerned with a specific round of bid. So it's not an administrative order, but rather a requirement list for the bidders. If I understand correctly this only applies to computers to be purchased during the bid. I'm not sure about how large the scale of the bid is, though; it may affect 1% of the government computer installations, or 99%. Either is possible without further information.

3) This notice doesn't say anything about Windows 7. What this means that bidders are allowed to provide computers pre-installed with Windows 7 and IMO this is pretty likely. Yes there are conspiracy advocates who would rather stick with Windows XP (I have never been able to understand their reasoning...), but I believe the computer vendors are more sensible. After all it's they who have to provide customer service.

4) This notice is also only concerned with the pre-installed OS. It's totally possible that the government officials may replace the OS with anything they like (which are, unfortunately, most likely pirate copies). I don't know about the central government, but it's common practice in local governments. The central government has very weak executive power when it comes to such detailed things. (Why bother enforcing such regulations after all?)

Interesting, given that the US Government itself does not run windows 8 yet.

Then it follows that there must be US government procurement documents that ban Windows 8 on government computers, as it would be part of the spec. Perhaps someone should tell Reuters, they might have forgot in all the excitement.

That's not how things work. US procurement is not going to leave the OS choice up to a third party so they may require win 7 but there not going to ban win 8. If for no other reason that offline computers are 'secure' enough for testing and the government has a lot of proprietary apps.

I suspect that whether a given government software spec includes blacklists, whitelists or a combination of both depends largely on who wrote it. Unless someone can show me that exclusive whitelisting is enforced US policy, I would think there will often be documents detailing which versions of software are not to be used on a given contract, as well as which ones are.

Source for your incorrect information?

DoD approved for more than a year:

http://iase.disa.mil/stigs/os/windows/win8.html

I'm sure that windows 8 is deployed in a more than a few places. But for instance, the department of Ag _just_ upgraded to windows 7 from XP (squeaking by the end-of-life deadline).

http://www.ocio.usda.gov/products-services/end-user-services...

In the case of the IRS, they are _still_ using windows XP, and they are paying Microsoft for support!

http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/13/irs-pays-microsoft-for-wi...

So basically what is say is Windows 8 sucks take it off the table anything else goes.

I'm quite certain most people would agree with that statement.

This doesn't contribute anything worthwhile to the discussion.

The GP has actually grabbed some of my sentiment. I doubt that it's just an outright expression of the frustration over Windows 8 from the government people as customers and doesn't have much conspiracy behind it, which the tone of Reuters seems to imply.

Your face doesn't contribute anything worthwhile to the discussion.

The 'worst' part is that Windows 8 is actually fine, except for the extremely superficial differences. Given the many options for reverting Windows 8 to essentially a faster Windows 7 but with a new UI, Microsoft has really shot itself in the foot.

If MS provided a group policy toggle to essentially say 'force Windows Classic mode', enterprises would have a lot less reluctance (beyond the normal reluctance that IT has to anything new, which is to get the enterprise's infrastructure into a state of balance and then not touch it for ten years).

Ah: http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1081755-do-you-like-or-hat...

So this is a post saying that they removed the start menu because they didn't want to update it a bit?

It's not really relevant to a "force windows classic" mode because the listed bugs are mostly interactions with new features.

The claim that they would have had to sacrifice significant other features is a strawman.

And they're doing the work anyway for the next service pack, apparently...

That post was from two years ago.

There were a lot of reasons the old start menu was removed. I listed some technical reasons why "just leave it in as an option" isn't as easy as it sounds.

It is not a straw man to say that investing in one area means you have to sacrifice in others. This is what we call software development.

Features are not added in service packs, and I don't even think service packs exist anymore (service packs are just collections of security and reliability updates, created and packaged together by a special "sustained engineering" team, not the product team).

The product team is building a new start menu option for a future version of Windows. It's a significant undertaking, not something they're throwing together willy nilly. They don't have a time machine, so they can't go back to 2012 and ship it then.

Yea, they are going to a different model, and I think they are going to ship the start menu in a future update.

Still, given that the missing start menu is most folks' #1 complaint about Windows 8, wouldn't you have to say that (at least in hindsight) it was a mistake to leave it out? Yes, software engineering is always about compromises, but isn't it also about making the right compromises?

> Features are not added in service packs

  Security Center
  Popup Blocking in IE
  Image Blocking in OE
  DEP
  Some others I can't remember

IIRC those were features introduced with Service Pack 2 of Windows XP.

It's a straw man to suggest that putting in the effort to update a fancy menu would have had so much impact that the product would have been ruined. But I think I misread your clause about 'disjointed' at first.

Only if you think basic UI functionality and a few decades of muscle memory x a few tens of millions of people is "superficial", that is.

It doesn't matter how awesome the changes under the hood are if it's painful to use. And I'd argue that the unwarranted attempt to shoehorn a (mediocre by itself) touch UI into a desktop, poorly, ranks as "painful", never mind the knock-on effects with certain configurations (laptop touchpads interpreting normal mouse movement as swipe gestures for example).

FYI, Windows doesn't interpret mouse movements as swipe gestures. Certain trackpad ODMs (i.e. Synaptics) did that, and did a terrible job of it.

They are superficial in "it will cust just a few hours of development time to fix". But certainly aren't superficial in "the user experience does not suffer because of them".

Microsoft is living a lot of money on the table.

I actually prefer the 8 UI to 7's. You click the start menu, and your intention is clearly to interact only with the menu, so why not make it take up the whole screen? The application icons on the bottom are also much more space efficient.

I think a majority of the complaints come from "this is different!" not "this is worse!".

No, the intention is to quickly start something without distracting from the main screen. There is no sane reason to go fullscreen here, if i have Writer open and want to start a calculator or MSN or whatever other app. I needed a few trials until i found where to shut down that stupid OS (and eventually installed the classic menu).

Interestingly i have a touchscreen laptop but on my main OS (Linux) i went the complete opposite direction lately, with a much more keyboard-driven setup, no fancy animations. Basically a distraction-free work machine, and not the colorful, animation-loaded distraction "beast" Windows has become.

I think the function of the windows key, where a menu pops up in the right and you can type out the application name, is what you want for that purpose. Ubuntu does the same thing. I'm pretty keyboard-centric myself, and this works really well for me. The fullscreen start menu is nice when you forget the exact name of the application, IMO.

> Ubuntu does the same thing.

And Ubuntu has similarly turned into an example of what not to do. This fad of cramming a touch UI down the throat of mouse users and acting like it's all perfectly natural is obscene.

I'm talking specifically about a feature that enables fast keyboard access to applications. I don't see how that has anything to do with mouse or touch UI.

Ubuntu's UI has its own issues, but that's not the point.

Synapse does a good job of this , but doesn't require the entire screen.

Ah, I wasn't on my windows computer when I checked it. I guess the standard windows key does go to fullscreen. The fast, small one is Win+S. It would be nice to be able to switch them.

What was the last time you go to China?

There could be a wide range of reasons for this, but I'm pretty sure a large part of it is protectionism. The Chinese government is pretty hostile towards foreign software in China, and they are probably displeased with China's dependence on Windows.

When I lived was in China, I contemplated starting a business there. Burgeoning market, and all. But I came to understand that it's a terrible idea. If you're a foreign national that manages to successfully launch a business in China, you are either morally corrupt, have given substantial bribes or have connections within the government. And if you were to become too successful, the Chinese government will make sure that you either cooperate or become insignificant.

I can't help but think that this strategy will damage their economy in the long run, but for now they are doing pretty well. Kudos to them for being one of few countries that actually manage to resist the massive influence of the US. If the PRC hadn't been protectionist, the Chinese would be using Google and Facebook just like the rest of us.

This doesn't really make sense in this case.

Facebook & Google have chinese alternatives. The alternative to Windows 8 is presumably some older Windows.

I'd say that's correct - XP is all over the place in China.

Not true, in the government.

Red Flag Linux is, I think, defunct; but they can copy Red Star OS from North Korea?

Nope, Ubuntu Kylin is a more likely alternative. see more http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/ubuntu-kylin

My point is that Facebook and Google would've been the dominant actors on the Chinese market today, not Weibo, QQ and Baidu, if the CCP hadn't been actively working against the US companies.

The alternative to Windows 8 is, for now, some older version of Windows XP. But as other commenters have pointed out, the CCP is pushing for a Linux-based alternative to Windows. There was an internal CCP document floating around on the Internet last year discussing the Chinese government's worries about not having a domestic OS for desktop and mobile. It'll be a tough transition to make, but compared to forced urbanization it's a walk in the park.

> My point is that Facebook and Google would've been the dominant actors on the Chinese market today, not Weibo, QQ and Baidu, if the CCP hadn't been actively working against the US companies.

To some degree I agree about this assertion, but you made some factual mistakes:

* The C2C (copy to China) relationship is Twitter -> Weibo, Facebook -> Renren and Google -> Baidu.

* QQ is an IM and the western equivalents MSN, Skype etc. were never banned in China. Also, QQ gained its popularity quite some before the GFW. I believe this is the most legitimate story where a Chinese product wins not due to GFW. Another such story is eBay vs. Taobao.

At least we can also name Dianping and Tudou were established before or at the same time as their western counterparts (Yelp and YouTube).

Baidu is older than Google.

Baidu was founded in 2000. Google in 1998.

However, Robin Li (founder of Baidu) seems to have begun his research on search engines earlier than Google founders. Therefore in some sense Baidu is older than Google, but that's not the most obvious sense :)

This does show that Baidu is not a C2C (Copy to China) product though. I'm happy to learn that.

Protectionism isn't necessarily good in the long term for these Chinese companies. They may not be as efficient as they could be if they were subjected to worldwide competition. If they are more efficient, then they should eventually be able to beat Facebook/Google/Twitter (I for one hope Alibaba will one day kill off eBay).

  > The alternative to Windows 8 is presumably some older Windows.

Not necessarily. There are other, more secure, free, operating systems.

Is it just a coincidence that Windows 8 gets banned just one day this story was published?

  The Justice Department has indicted five members of the Chinese
  military on charges of hacking into computers and stealing valuable
  trade secrets from leading steel, nuclear plant and solar power
  firms, marking the first time that the United States has leveled
  such criminal charges against a foreign country.

Seems that the most likely explanation is retaliation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-to-...

It is too early to say whose retaliation it is. Actually I have heard rumors that official files states that no Windows 8 machines should be bought in a government procurement a few days ago. I did not realize that this total boycott was happening then.

The indictment against the five PLA members was filed May 1, and only got publicized on May 19.

If rumors of a Windows 8 ban have been circulating recently, it could well be "sanctions" against the US in response to the indictment.

Hard to know for certain, but when the stated rationale for the ban doesn't make sense there must be another reason. Energy consumption? Security vs. XP?

To "sanction" the company that supported China's computer growth is kinda messed up. I am no windows fan-boy but how many billions of dollars were not spent on XP by Chinese companies? At some point you should invest in a Company, who's product you regularly use.

Let's not forget these are Companies, out-competing American and European businesses by costs.. not College students or teens or home users that can not afford the cost of an OS.

My point is, they should show this resentment to the US Government and not the company who let them get away with free OS all these years.

In China, many companies are extensions of the state apparatus, not truly independent. It's easy for China to see large American corporations as extensions of the US state.

Snowden's revelations about how Microsoft has "partnered" with the NSA to build backdoors for American surveillance make it more difficult to refute that view.

Not particularly new news.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsakey

To be fair, it is well documented that the US did the same back when it was still a developing economy. http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/Piracy----...

Might not be a coincidence about the reason but probably coincidence about the timing. I am fairly sure that the Chinese government has sources which bring the news faster than WP publishes them :)

> but I'm pretty sure a large part of it is protectionism.

Windows has a lot of prestige in China. It's imported from America. It's expensive. Working for Microsoft in China is insanely high-prestige. When non-engineers in China see I'm running Ubuntu they wonder why. Engineers who use Linux at work almost all have Windows machines at home, always a pirated copy.

I'm pretty sure a lot of Chinese bureaucrats are grumbling about this. "Oh now we have to use a crappy Chinese OS. Free is for losers!"

But I'm only surprised that it took this long. China is going to be the biggest economy on the planet. So far China has maintained a degree of autonomy and sovereignty unlike any US ally in the three inner rings of the NSA surveillance hierarchy has.

I expect other governments to follow. Most governments are in a position where they cannot compete with the NSA, domestically or internationally. Most don't have 1% of the NSA's budget for surveillance. They may all wish they could spy on their people like the NSA does, but wishes, horses, etc.

Some will realize that the only way to win is not to play the surveillance game. Instead they will put their resources toward securing their government and enterprise computing, and maybe even securing their populations, by banning US products and services associated with NSA surveillance programs.

Are you seriously comparing the NSA to China?

I'm sure the NSA would love to ban VPNs, break Wikipedia's encryption and openly have censorship / spying programs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project . But lets be frank, China is far ahead of anything going on in the Western world.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/13/china-crac...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/28/china_vpn_great_fire...

In the US, any hint of censorship or spying is met with extreme resistance. In China, censorship and spying isn't just accepted, its public policy. You can disappear for saying the wrong things on a public blog, and bloggers have developed codewords in response.

It can both be that the NSA has capacities that the Chinese envy and that the Chinese have capacities the NSA envies.

And the thing that China has, that the NSA most certainly does NOT have, is support of the public. China continues to make new public programs for censorship and domestic spying year after year, and there doesn't seem to be any stop to them.

China's Ministry of Public Security live listens to your connections and censors certain Wikipedia pages while you're browsing. I mean come on, the differences between China and NSA are incomparable.

The NSA barely can get away with looking at subpoenaed business records before Americans go apeshit crazy about it.

>there doesn't seem to be any stop to them.

The benefits of a one-party state. The real question is when is the next uprising and how many tanks will it take to crush it?

>And the thing that China has, that the NSA most certainly does NOT have, is support of the public.

Public Support? First of all, Chinese government is known to hire internet commentators to show the public is on the government side.

Secondly, if you have read some comments from Sina Weibo (China's twitter), you would know the public don't support, but can't do anything about the censorship. China comes from a era when simply saying the wrong thing against the leader could get you killed. The latest news this month was five prominent Chinese figures has been detained for attending a private meeting discussing the 25th anniversary of 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Also a journalist in her 70s has been detained with her son "on suspicion of leaking state secrets to a foreign entity." Both incidents were reported in this news story:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/07/world/asia/china-pu-zhiqia...

> Are you seriously comparing the NSA to China?

Where did I make such a comparison?

Isn't your point about doing business true regardless of wether you're a foreign national or not?

Yeah good on them for being protectionist and resisting foreign influence, but I doubt it's to their benefit. The Chinese alternatives to websites are worse in that they are highly cooperative with their censorship. The alternative to Windows 8 is likely going to be XP.

Or it will promote open source as a solution. If Windows 8 is banned, maybe Linux will be considered?

If I were a government official in China (or any major world power for that matter), I would definitely pursue a policy that reduced dependence on closed source American software in critical places (operating systems and networking hardware).

China can say whatever they want as a reason for banning, but the fact that they don't believe a US company to provide them with an operating system that even has a slight chance to be NSA secure feels quite sensible.

I guess in the long run we would see a Linux or *BSD sponsored by Chinese government to be used as an official OS. It's not like they lack talent to do it.

I guess an attempt already exists in the form of Ubuntu Kylin [1], ominously sponsored by the National University of Defense technology [2]. But I have a hard time determining how serious the project is, and how prevalent it is in China.

[1] http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/ubuntu-kylin [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_University_of_Defense_...

Everyone uses Windows in China. Half the sites won't even render correctly unless you use IE.

This is the government we are talking about. They visit websites outside the Great Firewall. So they need a modern browser.

A major Hong Kong Bank even listed IE as a required browser you needed to use to access your account. Insane.

It is quite successful apparently

Downloads from the Ubuntu Kylin community sites in China are continuing to gain momentum, with over three million people downloading Ubuntu Kylin in the first 12 months. The initial adoption of Ubuntu Kylin 14.04 LTS, launched in April, has been phenomenal, with over one million additional new downloads.

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2014/05/15/huge-downloads-for-ub...

Just for perspective, 3 million users in China is the equivalent of about 700k users in the US.

It's not insignificant, but neither is it like every third Chinese person is running Kylin. Heck, even OSX has 20 million or so users in the US[0]

[0] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2050510/windows-8-users-now-o...

There are larger villages than that in China. Still you can visit a computer market in China and about 40% of the computers will be displayed with Ubuntu. So the average Chinese consumer is getting exposure to Ubuntu which is a good thing.

Based on the partners listed on the Ubuntu Kylin page, it has more traction with significant ISVs in China than Ubuntu Desktop has in the US.

There is a bit of irony in that the first Ubuntu Kylin OEM is HP. Presumably those machines will not be shipped from the US.

It looks like it is possible to build Ubuntu Kylin from source code. The ISVs probably have closed source apps. But it is interesting that a large swathe of users in China are being encouraged to use an OS that supports a lot of privacy-oriented software.

That's funny, when I looked at the description on Canonical's page, I had exactly the opposite intuition. (I thought "wow, I bet the China-specific apps have no end-to-end cryptographic security, and I bet several are even proprietary".)

Maybe it's a glass-is-half-full / glass-is-half-empty kind of phenomenon.

Looking more closely, I guess the Lotus IM app doesn't support OTR (but neither does the official release of Empathy) and the Kingsoft cloud storage doesn't directly support client-side encryption (but neither did Ubuntu One).

Red Flag Linux is dead. Are they going to try it again?

They had one called Red Flag Linux, but apparently it shut down recently:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux

Linux Deepin may be another choice beyond Ubuntu Kylin.

If they fear NSA spying why still use XP ?

If you use Windows 8 you're vulnerable to talented crackers and governments. If you still use Win XP you're vulnerable to anybody.

Maybe they're just afraid of integration of Azure / Skydrive / whatever the new name is that could possibly create embarrassing sharing mistakes.

Maybe because they've fixed XP for their security concerns: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/qihoo-360-announces-...

Interesting. Can't find any info about in on http://360safe.com/ though...

It's part of their "360 Safe Guard"[1] software. But I think it's only available in Chinese. They also have an "enterprise" edition.

[1] http://www.360.cn/weishi/index.html

Ah, thanks.

@unicornporn, Agree, I wanted to use it as a solution and I was not able to find it.

> If you use Windows 8 you're vulnerable to talented crackers and governments. If you still use Win XP you're vulnerable to anybody.

And government is essentially like management. Honesty: 0. Integrity: 0. Sanity: 0. That answers your question.

>they don't believe a US company to provide them with an operating system that even has a slight chance to be NSA secure feels quite sensible

Or a British company or an Canadian company or an Australian etc. etc.

How much money has China's government paid Microsoft for OS in the past?

(The question I'm really asking: how much piracy did China do in the past, and how likely is that going to just continue as is?)

The biggest threat to China's IT security isn't Windows (as bad as it is), but rather the rampant software piracy. Anyone who thinks that the NSA, and any other state actor, can't sneak malicious code into software which is distributed in a black market is kidding themselves.

Linux is really not an easy thing for people working in Chinese government.

I would think nation states already work under the assumption that the NSA and other agencies are actively trying to infiltrate their systems. The recent NSA revelations can't be news to them. So why stop using it now I wonder?

Same reason USA want Huawei out.

Germany did similar 9 months ago; except they specifically state the TPM is _not_ to be trusted [1]

[1] http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-08-26/german-gover...

Oh this is great, this seems to be the most plausible reason.

Wow, I think I somehow missed what TPM actually does, if "The goal is Digital Rights Management and computer security" as stated in the article that sounds horrible. A backdoor for the USA and hardware-level DRM, great.

That's actually a contradiction. DRM and security are mutually exclusive. The level of control that enables a remote party to "trust" a computer makes it impossible for the owner to have a rational basis for trusting it. For security you have to have the possibility of complete information and control at every moment, and that is exactly what DRM is designed to exclude.

I feel it may have something to do with the recent news that US charges "five Chinese army officers with espionage charges for hacking into major US companies": http://nypost.com/2014/05/19/us-to-charge-chinese-military-o...

Is Windows 7 banned too? Otherwise this doesn't make much sense regarding the so called security reason.

EOL for Windows 7 is 2020, EOL for Windows 8 is 2023. If security is the real issue, they should be banning Windows 7 in favor of Windows 8 (or perhaps Windows altogether in favor of some OS that is a lesser target for malware etc., but I don't see any hint of this).

Or maybe it does:

http://news.techworld.com/security/3465259/is-windows-8-a-tr...

That article makes even less sense. It confuses UEFI secure boot with TPM and Bitlocker. Also claims UEFI secure boot makes things less secure by locking out other OSes. What?!

Can't find the link right now, but if I remember correctly, they backtracked on those claims about Windows 8 and made them more general about OSes. There is nothing in Windows 7 that makes it more secure or less vulnerable than Windows 8.

UEFI caused a ton of problems for Linux operating systems in the early days, and it took Linux vendors to compromise on getting the keys from Microsoft to make it work for the most part. So that part of the analysis was quite correct.

No. Actually any Windows 8 computer bought by Chinese government will be downgraded to Windows 7.

If that's the case then it's not about security. It's not about saving money. It's not about dependence on MS/US software.

That makes it similar to most corporate places where Windows 7 is preferred and Windows 8 is "banned" because of both the big UI changes in Windows 8 that are touch and consumer oriented plus compatibility testing etc. with software.

Microsoft open source their Windows 7's(and windows server 2008, Office 2003) source code to the China government since June ,2010. But they have not allow China to review their Windows 8 source code yet.

The name of this program is the "Government Security Program".

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2003/jan03/01-14g...

I found it odd that Microsoft justified the GSP in terms of the "unique security requirements of governments". I could also refer to the "unique security requirements of civilians": individual bearers of human rights, targets of espionage and surveillance by well-funded sophisticated adversaries, typically don't have large IT budgets... and if one "unique" part is supposed to be that Microsoft would be pressured to include a backdoor in its products to facilitate spying on foreign governments, well, plenty of civilians (including American civilians) fear that Microsoft would be pressured to include a backdoor to facilitate spying on them.

(I would not use the term "open source" here, because Microsoft didn't make the code open source, it just allowed particular people to read it!)

A super power that doesn't have their own OS is not really a super power.

It's definitely political and its no secret. However, they should follow what city of Munich did by systematically switching to Linux (MuLix)

http://www.cio.co.uk/news/change-management/munich-open-sour...

8 hours ago I read this and the reasons where because Windows 8 was expensive in China, now they are talking more about security: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-05/20/c_1333472...

I do not understand what they are planning. So they do not want to upgrade to win8... are they considering win7 or they just want to keep using xp indefinitely? There was not a plan of Ubuntu to ship a personalized os version in china some time ago? Where it ended?

Sounds like they're trying to force MS to continue supporting Windows XP. Doesn't MS already do this if you pay them? If so, China is trying to force Microsoft to continue to support XP for free. A bold move.

Microsoft has a yearly increasing price for supporting XP. It wouldn't take very many years of that for it to become silly.

And also microsoft keep supporting xp ONLY IF the client had made a plan with deadlines to upgrade his current configurations.

So what happens if a huge client (like the Chinese govt) says either Microsoft support XP or they drop windows for ubuntu (or something similar)?

I would imagine Microsoft wouldn't much care at this point. They give away Windows 98 for free. If people demanded they support XP for free forever... I don't think they're going to do that.

Nah, they want to grow their own internal software ecology. This is all about weaning Chinese off of foreign software.

I do agree that China might want to do that but how does not upgrading to Windows 8 help grow their internal sw ecology?

I think even windows 8 is banned, the government may still keep buying win7 PCs.

Although there are many company in this country are developing linux distribution such as Deepin, the products are still far from easy to use.

But as a Chinese I support this action because this may contribute to free this country of a heavy dependence of MicroSoft's products. Let the younger generation knows there exists not only one operating system in the world will help improve this countries' average computer knowledge.

"windows 8" site:.zycg.gov.cn returns 1050 results. Too bad I can't open them from the US to verify the news myself. Anyone with access can confirm it with details?

From the uk: 1,090 results

you can see the news here.

http://www.zycg.gov.cn/article/show/242846

5. 所有计算机类产品不允许安装Windows 8操作系统。 5. all computer products are not allowed to install Windows 8 operating system. (Google Translate)

The idea that competing governments, financial institutions, telecommunications and energy companies, etc use the same software – when it’s proven that there is no such thing as real security – is ludicrous. Perhaps Microsoft’s next big profit will be through developing unique software for single government and corporate entities with connectivity for general information but totally secure for trade and government secrets and personal identification.

There's also a discuss on Zhihu (think it as Chinese Quora..). Some assumptions: http://www.zhihu.com/question/23831190?rf=23837828

* maybe its for pushing Ubuntu Kylin OS to market * The gap on user interface might bring difficulties in govenment * might be some time bofore the source code is examined. * might be new startups on this market

Is not that an irony? Microsoft closes support of XP in hopes people move to W8, while China bans W8 because Microsoft closed XP support.

> Microsoft closes support of XP in hopes people move to W8

Do you really think that's why Microsoft dropped support for a 12 year old OS?

Can I start hoping for linux and FOSS funding!?

I expect to see a headline soon reading "Not so fast, Linux!" with an article explaining that this is nothing more than a negotiation tactic to get Microsoft to offer cheap support.

Both peers are bad, but hate the ideas to make this proceed.

Also a funny to find another post that "Game of thrones author" working on DOS... Lol

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/windows-not-coming-gam...

Prediction: they are going to get to an agreement pretty soon. MS seems to react quite quickly recently.

Given the recent issues between the two governments on cybernetic issues, I guess its sensible for MS to discuss it first home and then react. That would slow the reaction a bit.

What cybernetic issues? Du you even know what cybernetics means?

sorry, cybernetic spying issues, I meant

I doubt it, China would only be happy if they could vet & build the source code themselves. MS wouldn't be too clever to give them that.

If this is really about security and not to pull off exactly that above.

Rumors say, that happened with Russia with Windows 7 (and I've heard similar stories about Windows 98, 2000 and XP). Why not China?

http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-opens-source-code-to-russian-...

In my completely uneducated opinion based on heresy China seems to care a great deal less about intellectual property, patents and licencing right of companies that aren't Chinese.

Given its regular practice of trying to get companies to manufacture goods in Chine to steal their process' and technology.

This is also the exact reason SpaceX don't file patents and do not use anything from Microsoft.

You see, Russia isn't that caring about copyrights, too. There were relatively recent (this happened after Windows XP release) industry lobbying that led to massive rewrite of copyright laws, but illegal copying is still nearly ubiquitous.

MS gives you sources to audit if you pay enough, and the builds may be deterministic.

Shared Source initiative. Many organizations already have this.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/government-secu...

I'm somewhat surprised they didn't do this long ago. Unless they have the source I'm surprised any government uses any operating system.

To be honest I am surprised that they ever sanctioned the use of Windows software at all in China given their general distrust of the west.

This link won't open up in Safari 7.0.3. Every time I try, CPU shoots up to 100% and nothing happens. Works fine in FF though.

It is very likely that the Chinese government prefers Windows 7 to Windows 8. Why the fuss about XP, protectionism?

They probably worry about backdoors?

I think Chinese government will use Windows 8 together with government sponsored Linux based OS.

IIRC, large customers--and China's Govt is one of them--have access to the Windows source code so safety and security probably aren't the top concern. They can surely audit the code, they have the expertise, money and manpower.

My guess is that US and China went to war over cyber-spying...

Nobody but Microsoft and perhaps the US government has access to all the Windows source code, and nobody outside of Microsoft has the ability to build a runnable Windows.

What they mean is, you are not supposed to install a paid copy of Windows 8 on any government computer. (downvoters, hint irony)

tl;dr Windows 8 is a piece of crap.

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