Chinese military to replace Windows OS amid fears of US hacking

https://www.zdnet.com/article/chinese-military-to-replace-windows-os-amid-fears-of-us-hacking/

by PatrolX • 7 years ago

75 81 7 years ago

zdnet.com

duxup5• 7 years ago

I'm a bit surprised they run it at all.

jseliger• 7 years ago

Likewise. I wouldn't, if I were them.

JohnFen• 7 years ago

I'm not willing to use Windows on my home machines, and I'm not them.

nemild• 7 years ago

I'm surprised that "security by obscurity" is touted as a way reduce attacks. This is almost guaranteed to lead to less diligence in the code — and more risks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

duxup5• 7 years ago

Indeed.

I wonder how much that has to do with human nature thinking "well this is obscure" so then they don't secure it as if it was 'customer facing' or less 'obscure'.... and thus leave it more open than ever.

I knew a place that assumed such things, crazy insecure. They also played the "well this shouldn't be exposed to the internet" game as well.

MentallyRetired• 7 years ago

It's closed source, though. The whole codebase is obscure to them. Using it would be obscurity.

sdinsn• 7 years ago

Obscurity isn't supposed to replace security, it just aids it. Note that the US government heavily practices this, with 'Suite A' cryptography. Most other governments have similar practices.

781• 7 years ago

Quote from the same page:

In recent years, security through obscurity has gained support as a methodology in cybersecurity through Moving Target Defense and cyber deception.[9] NIST's cyber resiliency framework, 800-160 Volume 2, recommends the usage of security through obscurity as a complementary part of a resilient and secure computing environment.

sametmax3• 7 years ago

If they don't use Linux, I wonder how long it will take them to have something productive for the average worker.

I mean, Android took a decade to be usable, was built by one of the most talented and rich company on earth. Yet it is still limited in what it allows you to do: no office suite, limited driver support, weak multi-monitor, can use few FS formats, no RAID, etc. And that is despite Android actually wrapping a Linux Kernel.

Not to mentions they'll need to get so many basic tools ported.

No matter the high competence of the Chinese tech scene, their ability to brutally push an agenda and the number they can throw at it, I can't imagine a scenario where those resources wouldn't be better spent validating and customizing an existing distro.

However, I can imagine many reasons they would choose the harder road. And as a geek, I find it sane to remind myself that technical efficiency is not the goal of all entities.

PhasmaFelis• 7 years ago

no office suite

I'm nitpicking, I know, but do Google Docs/Sheets/Slides count? They're clearly inferior to MS Office, but they do exist.

sametmax3• 7 years ago

If they want to avoid a US OS, they probably want to avoid a US service too.

Bakary• 7 years ago

I wonder what happened with Ubuntu Kylin. It seems they were on that path already.

PatrolX4• 7 years ago

Huawei happened.

Downloading from: https://mirrors.huaweicloud.com/

Download cancelled.

duxup5• 7 years ago

It has to be some form of linux.

For all the reasons you said, it would take so long to get something usable, let alone security....

PatrolX4• 7 years ago

Chinabuntu, coming soon.

neves• 7 years ago

These are features for a desktop computer, not for a mobile phone. That's why they were not priorized/implemented.

jiveturkey2• 7 years ago

If they don't use Linux, I wonder how long it will take them to have something productive for the average worker.

If the do use Linux, I wonder that.

Not being snarky. Linux is unusable for "the average worker".

nicoburns• 7 years ago

I think this is just a matter of familiarity. I've seen highly non-technical users find linux as easy if not easier than windows.

The problems are mainly unsupported hardware and lack of software support. But if you stick with open alternatives then you can do just fine.

sametmax3• 7 years ago

My 60 year old mother have been using Ubuntu every day for the last decade.

It's just a matter of familiarity. She just want to check her mail et watch videos, after all.

faissaloo• 7 years ago

I installed Linux for my 40 year old mother and she can use it fine.

deehouie2• 7 years ago

You'd be amazed how much more technical competent average Chinese are compared with Americans

diveanon2• 7 years ago

I installed ubuntu on the laptop of a 70 year old hostel owner in Cambodia.

It took her an afternoon with me to figure it out.

Stop spreading this nonsense.

officeplant3• 7 years ago

If I can teach my aging mother(57) to use standard ubuntu 18.04 as her first computer ever then anyone can learn linux. Everything she needs is clearly presented in the bar of application icons and the ancient scanner/printer someone gave her works perfectly. Bonus points for when I go visit and there is a handful of .exe's hacked facebook friends convinced her to download sitting uselessly in the download folder.

kazinator4• 7 years ago

Android took a couple of years to be usable, then the rest of the decade to be come unusable.

I have one phone from 2012. Wow ... so easy to do everything.

- no swipe first to unlock the screen: directly to pattern

- input method switching easy and convenient

- settings buried less deeply

- ...

kazinator4• 7 years ago

No office suite: https://products.office.com/en-us/mobile/office-mobile-apps-...

Limited driver support? Android devices are typically highly integrated: they use custom SoC's (that you've never heard of) with drivers developed specifically for those SoC's and their blocks.

(Oh, your amazingly rare phone has a PCI slot, and your graphics card is not supported, bummer!)

panpanna4• 7 years ago

Surprisingly, Hisilicon (Huaweis chip company) tries to use as many standard components as possible.

Getting a hisilicon soc up and running is a joy compared to working on a qcom or Samsung soc. Upstream Linux often works out of the box.

xbmcuser• 7 years ago

Ubuntu with wine now days works with 90%+ of legacy apps. And with Valve putting it's muscle behind it many older games are running well as well now. So I don't think Chinese goverment would have much of a problem moving off windows

ksaj• 7 years ago

Don't forget Red Star Linux is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

If North Korea can pull that off, you can be sure China is well on the way. I would be quite amazed if that wasn't in the works all along already.

gscott• 7 years ago

They will probably use the Windows NT codebase that was leaked...

panpanna4• 7 years ago

There is already a Chinese version of Ubuntu. It allows they to use what everyone else are using which has certain benefits.

I think Ubuntu founder is still barred from entering US so he probably doesn't care...

exabrial• 7 years ago

I mean... every country should.

notimetorelax2• 7 years ago

I read somewhere that Soviet Union fell because it spent all its funds on projects like this. I wonder if this is beginning of the end or if they will be able to pull this off?

It might be a good sales pitch for “US-hardened equipment”.

JamesBarney• 7 years ago

Chinese is in a much different place economically than the Soviet Union was.

notimetorelax2• 7 years ago

With the cheap labor coming from rural areas it has similarities with USSR in 50 and 60s. Found some research on the topic: http://www.centrosraffa.org/public/bb6ba675-6bef-4182-bb89-3...

trufflepig• 7 years ago

i don’t think big-O cares about a couple orders constant

pjc50• 7 years ago

I'll just point out that "replace foreign vendors with domestic for security reasons" is exactly what the US is trying to do to Huawei. I think the US and China are equally capable of succeeding at this kind of project..

Cyberdog• 7 years ago

I'd say the Chinese are more capable of this than the US, if for no other reason than that's the place where almost all hardware and hardware components are already made.

deehouie2• 7 years ago

The implicit assumption in most HN discussion is, if the US's doing it, it's fine and good. On the other hand, if China tries, it's doomed to fail.

Symmetry• 7 years ago

Yes, but the Soviets were running their entire economy like that. China and the US do stupid thing like that with their military spending all the time but they're taking in resources from healthy civilian economies rather than sclerotic ones.

siffland• 7 years ago

I would not be suprised if it is an offshoot of FreeBSD. That way they could get away from the GPL license altogether and wont violate any licensing agreements.

If they based it off Linux, unless it was avalible to download online, it would probably infringe on the GPL somewhere. Assuming they care about those things.

adriantam• 7 years ago

if they moved that way, why they would care about GPL violation?

kazinator4• 7 years ago

Because each of their copy of Windows is properly licensed now, and they wouldn't want to blemish their saintly compliance record when they switch to something else.

tombert• 7 years ago

I could be wrong, but I thought the GPL basically said "anyone who has access to the binary must have access to the source code". This is why you're allowed to write a webserver with GPL libraries without having to worry about releasing the code to the users (unless it's AGPL), since the users don't have access to the binary, just the stuff that the binary is producing.

If that were the case, I think they'd be in the clear legally to use Linux as long as they offered to provide the source code to anyone in the military who had access to the binary, which wouldn't be the general public.

That said, just to avoid the headache, I'd probably choose FreeBSD as well if I were in charge of the Chinese military.

kazinator4• 7 years ago

Because China and especially their military cares deeply about foreign software licenses?

unless it was avalible to download online, it would probably infringe on the GPL somewhere.

The GPL does not mandate redistribution; it imposes conditions on redistribution, if/when redistribution happens.

Good luck imposing conditions on what China does "in-house" with some pieces of freeware.

tantalor• 7 years ago

Is this news from 2002?

ConfusedDog• 7 years ago

Ideally for improving security, they should invest on supporting open source software, hardware and standards. Open Design Principle is much better long term strategy than Security by Obscurity. But for developers in China, there are a lot of obstacles with contributing to open source communities worldwide, so I can see that probably not going to happen.

End of the day, policymakers are more educated with economics than cybersecurity and computer science. They probably still gonna use Microsoft products.

duxup5• 7 years ago

They probably still gonna use Microsoft products.

Even if they did get rid of most MS products. Some senior guy probabbly fires up windows and installs a dozen search bars.

I knew a guy who served in the gulf, he was pretty high ranking, handled some security stuff. Got a request from someone important to basically break all the rules because important guy didn't want to walk too far from his CHU to make a call home.... but he was high enough ranking so they did it. It wasn't even a far walk.

panpanna4• 7 years ago

Some senior guy probabbly fires up windows and installs a dozen search bars.

A "security expert" at a F500 once showed my a web page on his laptop. Only 40% of the page was visible due to his 7-8 search bars.

hutzlibu2• 7 years ago

"Open Design Principle is much better long term strategy than Security by Obscurity."

Better would be both. You have a strong, open base, like Linux, but you modify it, so you habe a second level of defence.

andreime• 7 years ago

This approach ends up blocking you from receiving updates due to do incompatibilities between your changes and upstream so it's not a great solution.

Manjuuu• 7 years ago

They could just license Red Star OS.

UberofXplsgo• 7 years ago

Actually North Korea isn't currently allowed to have exports so that would be an illegal transaction

unicornfinder• 7 years ago

It's certainly an interesting OS. Reading up on it it supposedly tags all files it comes into contact with.

bradhe2• 7 years ago

Beijing officials have decided to develop a custom operating system that will replace the Windows OS on computers used by the Chinese military.

Okay. Good luck with that.

craftyguy2• 7 years ago

You act like it is hard to run an OS on a computer that is not windows (hint: it is not.)

bradhe2• 7 years ago

Creating a custom OS from scratch that's somehow more secure than a system that's 40 years old will be a real interesting feat.

If they base it on Linux (didn't see evidence of that but didn't get that far in to the article) then that'll give them some head start.

lostmsu• 7 years ago

I wonder if they will use ReactOS.

It is Windows-compatible.

O1111OOO• 7 years ago

Food for thought...

I strongly suspect that this new OS will be coming from Huawei.

It makes sense that a Chinese company develops an OS for their own government. We are in the spyware era, afterall.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear, years later, that Huawei's "backup" effort was never to replace Android on consumer devices but to fork it for Chinese government use. It's too convenient an excuse to have so much work done on so many doomsday scenarios. Huawei, I think, was already tasked for the new OS(es) by China.

Similarly, their efforts to replace Windows[0] was to provide their government with a "homegrown" OS solution. Not unlike Sailfish in Russia[1].

As much as I like the idea of a new OS competing on the world stage, preferably based on Open Source... it's simply not going to happen coming from either Huawei or China. Control of data is the the overriding motivator among nearly every tech firm and government. When these transitions take place (gov and Huawei consumer), I might as well be running RedStar OS or a US-based commercial alternative.

[0] https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3011660/microsoft...

[1] https://nokiamob.net/2019/02/09/sailfish-os-is-now-aurora-os...

powerapple• 7 years ago

Huawei is not developing desktop OS. It has been developing a mobile/IoT OS. And I don't think anyone would develop a OS from scratch given the obvious option Linux.

RyanAF7• 7 years ago

Lot of the comments seem to miss the point.

It's for the military, not consumers. It won't need driver support or features like a consumer OS.

The more foreign the layout probably the better as you can train new habits more easily when the environment for old ones doesn't exist.

Have a feeling the end result will be the same, "We built it!"

spy leaks code hacked

bigato2• 7 years ago

I am surprised that some comments state that it "has to be linux". Since they can't magically reduce the time it would take to develop something that complex nowhere near their time constraints, it obviously has to start with something that already exists. But Linux is not the only open source OS out there, folks. If I were charged with this task, i'd start with OpenBSD, given its focus on security. The fact that most of base is BSD licensed also helps because no changes would be legally required to be opensourced. It also can run modern web browsers and libreoffice, which is a significant part of what goes for "desktop" computing these days.

Junk_Collector• 7 years ago

Why would a Chinese Linux derivative need be open source? It's not like you're going to go into China and force the government to comply with your license.

bigato2• 7 years ago

It would be legally required to be opensource, whereas with BSD it wouldn't. That's all I argued. Whether some country will try to enforce it via whatever means is another question altogether.

Chinese military to replace Windows OS amid fears of US hacking

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