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China Bans Government Purchases of Windows 8
itwbennett (1594911) writes "Last week, China's Central Government Procurement Center posted a notice on new requirements for government tender, that included, among other things, the mysterious request that Windows 8 be excluded from the bidding process on computer purchases. The agency could not be reached Tuesday, but China's state-controlled Xinhua News Agency said that the government was forbidding the use of Windows 8 after Microsoft recently ended official support for Windows XP."
seems like the rest of the entire world would ban everything that comes from the USA, or even just passed through the USA, things like routers, computers & software, TVs, Stereos, portable radios, cellphones, anything electronic, the NSA's spying methods have basically gutted any confidence & trust the rest of the world would have in the USA
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Might as well use some other unsupported OS
but to have it supported you first need to buy a licence for it... that kinda rules out Chinese copies of XP.
This just in: China was considering paying for an operating system!
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
If this is because they're upset at Microsoft for dropping XP support so quickly, then what are they going to? What OS has a longer support cycle than XP's 12.5 years?
Red Hat's is 10 years. AIX is 5-7. HP-UX is 8. Ubuntu LTS is 5 years. Mac OS is 4-ish. Solaris is likely the closest at 12 years... But its still less. Maybe they'll roll their own support?
It doesn't sound like they are actually forbidding the use of Windows 8. They are just forbidding the purchase of windows 8. I guess as long as pirated copies are used, then everything is fine?
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
If I were procurement I would ban it too.
This is not about Windows 8. This is about the MS / NSA love affair. My company has done the exact same thing. No more windows after 7. Only approved Linux variants from here on....
On the flip side, forcing everyone to use Windows 8 would be a violation of fundamental human decency.
Honestly, I feel that many of the news services that have reported this story got the motive all wrong. I think that the Chinese government not wanting to adopt Windows 8 has much more to do with a convoluted interface and inflated licensing fee than spite over the Windows XP support debacle. Of course this is just my opinion, but from what I hear in the workplace every day in regards to Windows 8, there is a very similar narrative going on here at home.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan
No, this is proof of the recent industrial espionage allegations against China; they've obviously seen the source code for Windows 8, and they know they don't want it.
They are obviously heading for open source instead of being locked in to Microsoft.
You would be surprised at how little Linux is used in China. A few years ago, I went to a Linux User Group meeting in Shanghai. Nearly everyone there was either an expat or a haigui, and most of the meeting was conducted in English. When I bought a computer at a local shop, and asked them to install Linux instead of the normal pirated copy of XP, the shopkeeper told me no one had ever requested that before. I have never understood why the Chinese government doesn't promote Linux, rather than relying on a foreign corporation. Open source should naturally appeal to them, since they are nominally commies anyway.
I didn't need to see the source code for Windows 8 to come to the same conclusion...
I'd say it's more accurate to speculate that they have the Win 8 source code and will roll out their own.
No, this is proof of the recent industrial espionage allegations against China; they've obviously seen the source code for Windows 8, and they know they don't want it.
Actually Microsoft gives governments (No espionage needed) access to the windows and office source code including the US, Russia, China and other big licenser's. My guess is in this case it backfired and they found shit in it they don't want to touch with a ten foot pole. Possibly another _NSAKEY check?
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
The butthurt is strong with these guys.
Even funnier is their behaviorr in the South China Sea. Totally unreasonable, bullying behaviour, but if you want to see somebody go off their brains, trying pointing out to China they're objectively behaving like bullies and that they have no right to seize territory that isn't theirs...
Everyone in their local neighbourhood thinks they're cunts, but in the eyes of the Chinese themselves, they can do no wrong, and it's everyone else's fault.
I guess we know why China and Russia are getting so lovey-dovey recently. They both have the disease of 19th-century nationalism, lunacy and paranoia -- and misery loves company.
I guess state-level paranoia and stupidity is the season's new look.
Yes, they give access to source code, but no instructions on how to build a binary that's 1:1 identical to the released version. This source code, for what it's worth, isn't proof that the release version is spyware-free.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Also, it would be against Geneva convention
Well, at least MS can count on a big CIA purchase then.
Doesn't alleviate the headache of fully checking your compiler's source code to make sure it doesn't do anything nefarious in select circumstances.
If you search the comments in the source code for the text "nefarious" or "evil" you probably won't catch it. But if you can spot an obfuscated system call handing out permissions like candy then you might have better luck.
You need to trust trust to trust in your compiler!
So long as your compiler can compile itself, and so long as you have access to other independent implementations of the same language, you can defeat the Ken Thompson attack with the David A. Wheeler defense. Just bootstrap your compiler with each of the other implementations (compile it with the other compiler, then compile it with the resulting binary), and if there's no attack, the binaries will converge. For example, if you have independent compilers A, B, and C, then C compiled with (C compiled with A) will be bit-identical to C compiled with (C compiled with B) unless an attack is in progress. Start by using Visual C++ Express, Clang, TCC, and even a C interpreter to verify your GCC.
Right! Cisco's gear likely has value-added NSA backdoors inside. That makes it a lot more desirable to buy than Huawei's likely built-in chinese backdoors. We should definitely buy more of our surveillance gear than their's.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Open source should naturally appeal to them, since they are nominally commies anyway.
When it comes to commodities they're not even remotely communist anymore, they literally don't care where you get your groceries and clothes and household items, unless those businesses or their owners try to have a political agenda. There's plenty of private enterprises and they don't care if the maker of the toothpaste factory cashes in big and the workers don't. What they do care about is control of public information, strategic industries and technology, infrastructure, natural resources and of course their own hierarchy and when that is at stake they will steamroll the individuals but my impression is that for most of the people most of the time it doesn't affect them very directly. The way most people don't see revolutionary changes if the US goes from Democrats to Republicans and back, the talk changes but daily life goes on.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I wonder if you've heard the news and read the page you linked to, it says:
"On 10 February 2014, Red Flag Software terminated all employment contracts and closed down. "
So I doubt it.
New things are always on the horizon
Compile clang with g++, and gcc with clang. Or Visual C++. The trick only works when there's only one available compiler.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You can use the other C compiler to compile old g++ and use old g++ to compile new g++.
Ever compile something twice?
If you're passing the same source files and the same flags to the same compiler and not getting the same result, then either A. your linker is leaking timestamps, or B. you've got RAM issues (as K. S. Kyosuke suggested), or C. you're compromised.