CHINA has ordered central government agencies and state-backed corporations to replace foreign-branded personal computers with domestic alternatives within 2 years, marking one of Beijing’s most aggressive efforts so far to eradicate key overseas technology from within its most sensitive organs.
Staff were asked after the week-long May break to turn in foreign PCs for home-made alternatives that run on operating software developed domestically, people familiar with the plan said. The exercise, which was mandated by central government authorities, is likely to eventually replace at least 50 million PCs on a central-government level alone they said, asking to remain anonymous discussing a sensitive matter.
The latest central government directive is likely to cover only PC brands and software, and exclude hard-to-replace components such as processors from Intel and AMD, the people said. China will mostly encourage Linux-based operating systems to replace Microsoft’s Windows Shanghai-based Standard Software is one of the top providers of such tools, one person said.
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/government-economy/china-orders-government-state-firms-to-dump-foreign-pcs-sources
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-06/china-orders-government-state-firms-to-dump-foreign-pcs
wanna do some dunking? check the r/linux thread
some good comments in that thread like this one
If any of you had ever had a real job, you would know that it is common practice for employers to install a bunch of different monitoring daemons on any company computers, in the name of "information security". These programs can monitor your internet traffic (even encrypted traffic because they force you to use their own certs), read your files, take screenshots, or even use AI to detect if your mouse activity is abnormal.
This article is about a new Chinese policy that effects government agencies and state-owned companies to change their computers. In America, virtually every government agency and contractor is using corporate Windows PCs with monitoring software pre-installed. Now, in China, virtually every government agency and contractor will use Linux PCs, presumably with monitoring software installed. What exactly is the difference here?
I think that the moves by foreign countries to divest from American proprietary software are great news. It is a fact that the NSA knowingly hoards vulnerabilities in Windows and other software (note that the CIA has done similar things). It is also quite possible that these backdoors were intentional placed by Microsoft in collusion with the NSA. If non-Americans stopped using Windows, the power of these backdoors would decrease, and probably the NSA stop. Also, some of these new Linux users will make contributions upstream, which will improve free software for everyone. This already happens in China.
That sounds like some high level 'free market' copium. There is more dedicated infrastructure involved in spying than not spying, even if it was better competively to stop spying, the NSA is operating on sunk cost logic at this point. Not only that, but these tech companies leverage those breachs in privacy to get huge tax breaks, meaning there is likely more of an incentive to maintain that infrastructure.
Idk guys, maybe the libertarians will be right about how the market works this time.
Windows is also much more frequently targetted for cyber attacks
When was the last time any of y’all had a ding dang computer virus? Web 2.0 and the centralization of the internet, in addition to torrents fading in popularity as streaming replaced it, has basically killed all wild viruses. Unless you are going on sketchy porn or ROM sites or something you probably won’t get a virus in 2022 even on windows
in addition to torrents fading in popularity as streaming replaced it
isn't it incredibly hard to get a virus from a torrent?
I only click the green skull guys on piratebay, never had any issues
The viruses I got back in the day from torrenting weren’t the files themselves, but the magnet link websites
u/darth_chewbacca The Chinese governments most feared enemy is not the United States, it's their own people.
Look at the insane amount of work being done to censor whats going on in Shanghai right now.
:doubt:
I’d be pretty concerned with the goddamn united states
Americans are unable to fathom what it looks like when a government responds to the needs of its people and parse that response as fear.
Chinese government news always sounds so ridiculous because no part of the American government even has the energy to do something as relatively small as this. My big empire took the grill pill and is just vibing into fascism.
yes!!!! the US can't figure out how to build a small bridge in Eastern Kentucky, and then China goes and casually makes rapid nationwide progress on problems as they come up.
part of it is that the US constitution was set up to make it virtually impossible to do anything.
Which was fine for the original purpose of the United States which was solely to form one entity that could owe the debt from the revolutionary war as well as pay the pensions of the continental army. The US constitution is basically having the legal equivalent of Y2K in terms of facing issues due to not being designed for the current situation or designed for the new situation
Do American ICBMs still run on big ass floppy disks or have they replaced those systems?
kind of based mods there, this was one mod's reply to somebody dropping "whataboutism"
Try to have more productive replies please or you will get banned.
biggest market on earth dropping Windows for Linux
:programming-communism: :yes-hahaha-yes-l:
But nerds keep telling me Linux is only good for tinkering and you can't do real work on it.
lmao. for serious work, like launching spaceships or genome sequencing, Linux is the only platform.
If China moved EVERYTHING to be open source then the result you would end up with is only the most authoritarian capitalist states remaining on closed software platforms designed to surveil their population with no accountability vs China and the new "free world" being completely open source.
There is a strategic method here for China to present itself as the "free" country while capitalist countries grasp to keep hold of control over everything.
The US bans Chinese technology: "long overdue. a good first step, but is it enough?"
China bans US technology: "authoritarianism!!!!"
