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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.
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...
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'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?
I'm not upgrading. I'm sticking with MaOS. I like my standards open.
If so then they are likely in non complience with the licenses involved.
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