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China's Government Unveils 'China Operating System' To Great Skepticism
redletterdave writes "The government of China is not too fond of foreign mobile operating systems like iOS and Android, so the country cooked up its own homegrown solution: A Linux-based, open-source operating system called the COS, or China Operating System. But consumers have every right to be skeptical; China is using the recent NSA scandal in the U.S. to push its own product. A government-approved mobile operating system, especially in China of all places, reeks of its own backdoor exploits for governmental spying."
Quick! Someone in the US pirate this and give them a taste of their own medicine!
remember, people in glass houses should not throw rocks. or something...
at this point i trust our current mobile OS's as much as i trust theirs. at least with theirs i have no doubts i'm being watched.
Given how compromised everything else seems to be what could they be expected to do except to try to have something they can trust. However, that doesn't mean it will ever see the light of day beyond their own governmental computers.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
It is restricted for US distribution as too secure, without NIST weak crypto or NSA backdoors.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"A government-approved mobile operating system, especially in China of all places, reeks of its own backdoor exploits for governmental spying"
As opposed to the reek of the daily NSA exploits published by Bruce Schneier?
In difference from for example the RSA back door this is open source , so the code is there to review for potential back doors for anyone with the necessary knowledge. I can imagine quite a few will do so only to be able and point fingers and say "see, see! they do it too!" and would be little surprised if there is a government sponsored team doing just that as I write with the hope there will be findings to detract attention from scandals closer to home.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
A government-approved mobile operating system, especially in China of all places, reeks of its own backdoor exploits for governmental spying."
As opposed to an operating system created by an American corporation, which reeks of its own backdoor exploits for governmental spying.
When all the Shell Infrastructure Windows servers got shut down at Venezuela directly from Redmond after the compayy's subsidiary there got nationalized, we learned a valuable lesson: closed source software is an error, at least at any government instances.
At least the Chinese OS is open source, so it could be audited by the users. I'm not saying they can't place a piece of code in the mobile phones or computers after the community audited it, but to me it looks like a step in the right direction...
Endorsed by Daleks everywhere as an alternative to NSA tainted American products!
If it's open source, then just audit it. Find what pieces are different in what ways and review those sections. I guess that's easier said than done, but still.
This should start appearing on low-end tablets within months. Especially the ones that use the Allwinner CPU. 100% China-controlled technology at last.
Where do you download the source?
A government-approved mobile operating system, especially in China of all places, reeks of its own backdoor exploits for governmental spying.
"Especially in China"
Did Cold Fjord write the blurb?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Can't wait to have a look at it. We know there will be backdoors and other goodies in it. Should be absolutely amazing to see what it monitors, how it does so, whom it calls home to, and so on. Let's see what China considers an ideal piece of software.
I think this will be a powerfully interesting piece of software to study. We'll learn a lot from it, I'll bet.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I guess the main difference between China and the US is that the US has the lure whistleblowers back for punishment while I suspect that China is much more efficient in remediating leaks.
I'm skeptical of this system because it is at least the second (after 'Red Flag', possibly more of them than that, certainly a lot more if you count 'nationalist linux forks' generally, rather than just Chinese ones), and past attempts havent exactly set the world on fire with their success.
More generally, though, I'm skeptical largely because (at the present time) you basically have to shop like Richard Stallman (and possibly even harder than he does, if some TAO-level group has designs on you) to have a chance in hell to even see all the security-relevant software/firmware that goes into your system in anything other than a mixture of OSS components, proprietary userspace applications, and firmware blobs (often doing not-even-a-debugger-knows-what on the various totally undocumented application-specific processors hanging off various busses). So long as that's the case, even if your OS is FOSS and you've audited the hell out of it (odds are you haven't) and you have a robust security model designed to keep applications in check (obligatory XKCD, odds are that it will all come to nothing because your lowballing vendor has a BSP full of proprietary shit, your GPU vendor won't offer anything but a binary blob unless you abduct the entire Board's families and threaten to return them one slice at a time, and you don't have a clue what various surprisingly punchy microcontrollers and very-low-end ARM cores attached to dangerously useful (and mostly unexamined) busses are doing in their own memory spaces.
If Team China manages to solve these problems(especially acute in cellphones because the cellular baseband which makes wifi interfaces look like GNU-paradise by comparison in terms of openness and robustness), then I'll be damn interested, no matter how much their 'yet another shitty fork of something that they could have just audited' linux-derivate OS bores me. If they don't manage to solve them, or don't even bother, that this is just some balance-of-trade enthusiast crying into his beer about Android's ubiquity in the Chinese smartphone market, who cares?
Been there, done that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS
Not to get all Stars and Stripes, but I trust Communist, Totalitarian dictatorships to write secure OS's about as far as I can throw them.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I thought this sounded like a dupe*, but Red Flag Linux is apparently not a Chinese government project as I began to think for some reason**.
*On China's part, not Slashdot's!
**Like, totally not because of the name or anything. ;)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Here we have absolute proof that Linux is for Communists. Just as Steve Ballmer said. Only a commie would use free software to write code so they don't have to pay the evil capitalists their 30 pieces of silver.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I'm not upgrading. I'm sticking with MaOS. I like my standards open.
So there was that Kylin Linux distro, then Ubuntu Kylin, and "Red Flag Linux," and now... a mobile one? Interesting key word, though, is that the article calls this an Open Source mobile OS. User "war4peace" noticed this, as well. I'll be the first to admit that I am *NOT* a coder, but how many backdoors can you hide in something that is open source? I'm sure it's large and it would take time to go through, but if it is open source it *could* be gone through, right?
I would prefer to be spied on by a country on the other side of the world than the one I'm living in. I'm never going to pay a visit over there, and they have no cooperation in data-exchange with the country I'm living in. I do not affect them (except possibly buying there cheap things on eBay), I'm just a number. And hence, they have no effect on me. Except possibly being able to provide more targeted ads for the stuff I like to buy from them. A bit like google. My home country (or allied "friends") spying on me however...
If they get foreign language input systems working in Linux, then who cares? At that point they've already improved the community, which is the beauty of open source.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If so then they are likely in non complience with the licenses involved.
Have gnu, will travel.
The debate is no longer about whether Linux should rule the world, but which flavor should.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
calling it China's Operating System is implying that they wrote everything from scratch.
Sort of like Google calling it Android OS implies they wrote everything from scratch?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Why should they bother? Linux is there already, and is free. No need to compete, no need to make their own os.
Just another OS for someone to release a root kit for.
Sent from my TARDIS
Yes, but only if this guy orders it to.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So you accept the premise that something on top of Linux or another kernel is not something of their own? How about Android or OSX?
Is it an Android fork or Gnu/Linux?
Why don't they simply buy SCO, I mean Ximian? Take it all, put UnixWare on Loongson or Allwinner in Beijing University and then put together something from scratch? Make the localization Mandarin only, and then run it? Yeah, I know that SCO was a dog in its day, but on today's hardware, and 2GB RAM, it should fly. Just put it on the Loongson, and watch it fly.
Since it's proprietary, they can build all the backdoors they want. They can drop all the SCO lawsuits in return for being granted rights to all patents that SCO's enemies own. In fact, since it's in China, they needn't do even that. They'll have their own OS that the West will want no part of. In fact, make SCO stand for Standardized Chinese OS, instead of Santa Cruz Operations.
I wouldn't be complaining, this is great! Diff all the common code. Hopefully you'll turn up the Chinese backdoors readily, and maybe they've also been smart enough to close some of the US ones, identifying those also.
An entire nation of a billion people that actually manufacture essentially all electronics where this might conceivably be used, and they use Linux? The government of China can't come up with something of their own?
I'm pretty sure that one of the reasons that Linux exists is so that everyone who wants to develop an operating system doesn't need to start from scratch. Whether the government of China is going to contribute anything back to Linux is another question. Even so, Linux does not belong to any government or nation. It was started by a Finnish guy who now lives in America and has contributors all over the world. If there's ever been a single piece of software that more or less belongs to everyone, it's Linux.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
And they have their own - Red Flag Linux. Just stage it on top of whatever they run, and they're off to the races
I heard there was Polish OS a few years ago, too. Not too widely used, but it had a similar acronym....
It runs from embedded small systems to supercomputers, so is generic enough to run in most of their existing computers/cellphones/watches/supercomputers/etc. You can start from zero, but it will take time and won't be as tested to be safe as it is Linux today. And they had already contributed to the linux kernel, and had already their own state sponsored distributions. Open source (if you can compile it, and verify that it is really what is in the source) ensures not only that foreing hands hadn't modified it, but that neither national hands did it, if they really don't want to trust in anyone.
Step 1: Make Bill Cosby your spokesperson
Step 2: Bippin and a Bobbin, flippin and a floppen, pudden pops!
Step 3: PROFIT!!!
And wonder if it makes sense to use as a firewall in front of a US-friendly one.
Seems a pair of firewalls ought to be configurable so unless *both* have a back door you're safe.
lets ask ourselves: who is going to spy on us with this gear?
if in the US and its the US spying, that's bad. they can do damage to you.
if in the US and its china spying, do I really care all that much? I would avoid using any payment methods but as for worrying about what I would say online, I'd think that the foreign governments would not really be able to do much to me no matter what I say.
your own local government has the ability to thoroughly ruin your life. to me, that makes them the stronger danger to my privacy and freedom.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
COS Play?
273 different methods to perform file copy.
I say it with confidence that in the 80s, America was truly or closest to a world leader, that every other country looked up to. Such great soft power contributed to the crumple of USSR. The 80s was the golden age of America, and probably for the world in general as well. But things turned ugly in the late 90s, and America went complete psycho after 911.
For their Native CPU perhaps? ( RedStar, mostly a MIPS copy, if i remember right. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Based on ubuntu?
If you ask any non-computer geek consumer on the street who wrote Android OS, they'll say google. So in their minds, google wrote it all.
This amounts to intellectual dishonesty on Google's part. "Oh we accidentally forgot to credit our sources, now nobody knows, heh heh, why should we do anything about it?"
Apple is obviously just as dishonest with FreeBSD and Webkit. But we expect a higher standard of behavior from Google... or do we?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I was about to say, this would be a perfect OS for use in the USA, because the NSA will be completely locked out. Sure, the politburo would know all about your applesauce cupcakes recipe, but that's the price of freedom from domestic oppression, right?
But then I got to thinking, a few years back there was a NIX branch that the NSA created or approved that was hardened out of the box, presumably to be used internal to the NSA and other alphabet soup groups. One would think that they wouldn't be crazy enough to backdoor their own system, so this might be a wonderfully secure system to keep the NSA fucks off your box...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
According to zdnet.com it is not open source. However, due to "safety concerns", COS is not an open source system, revealed a 21cbh.com report. If so then they are likely in non complience with the licenses involved.
There may be no compliance problem. COS may be like Android, effectively its own operating system with its own API, just using Linux as a host environment.
If it's based on Linux, it already contains a huge amount of code contributed by the NSA.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What happened to China supporting Red Flag Linux? And Ubuntu China? Why are they doing yet another nationalized distro?
Does this one have any benefit over the others?
They seem to be waiting for Taiwan to roll over and join them - perhaps with a bit of overt manipulation of Taiwanese politics. It's headed that way. It's also becoming less relevant all the time as the Chinese economy grows.
It's racism, pure and simple. China is the current boogyman, the enemy of the day for the US now that Islamic terrorism is receding.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Xinuos is the new name of UnXis, Inc., a company formed by Stephen Norris Capital Partners and MerchantBridge Group which in April of 2011 acquired the operating assets of The SCO Group, Inc.
AAARGH! It will not die!
Watch this Heartland Institute video
A Linux-based, open-source operating system called the COS, or China Operating System
So, I can run the aforementioned country using this Operating System?
So what? English is lingua franca for most of the western world. It's boring as hell, actually. You see people from all corners of Europe together in a room, all speaking English to each other. It's not a question of who is number one, it's about how English gets used in the real world. Being the most popular second language (which Ethnologue claims is true of English) is actually more important the number of native speakers, at least until such point as perfect audio-based machine translation becomes ubiquitous (likely never).
Half your posts are provocative by way of being wholly obtuse, and the other half are merely provocative.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Why should they? Linux works and they can alter any part of it they choose.
You don't see China inventing new-fire or new-wheel either.
Your post motivated me to get up from my couch in the basement and go find my bowl, which I had previously obfuscated under a piece of detriment to avoid plain view.
have one 4 me 2
Multiple films of the past have posed the villain as being a large corporation that engineered backdoors into its OS software, yet now we accept this as a given in most every case.
What was the target language?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The opportunity to introduce a new operating system platform with sufficient critical mass to overcome existing standards is an opportunity to introduce advances in OS theory, and languages, that have been achieved over the decades. Hell, f all they did was adopt the A2 operating system with Active Oberon it would be an advance over Linux/"C".
Seastead this.
Gives a whole new meaning to COSplay....
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.