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Microsoft Delivers Secure China-Only Cut of Windows 10 (theregister.co.uk)
Earlier this week, CEO of Microsoft Greater China, Alain Crozier, told China Daily that the company is ready to roll out a version of Windows 10 with extra security features demanded by China's government. "We have already developed the first version of the Windows 10 government secure system. It has been tested by three large enterprise customers," Crozier said. The Register reports: China used Edward Snowden's revelations to question whether western technology products could compromise its security. Policy responses included source code reviews for foreign vendors and requiring Chinese buyers to shop from an approved list of products. Microsoft, IBM and Intel all refused to submit source code for inspection, but Redmond and Big Blue have found other ways to get their code into China. IBM's route is a partnership with Dalian Wanda to bring its cloud behind the Great Firewall. Microsoft last year revealed its intention to build a version of Windows 10 for Chinese government users in partnership with state-owned company China Electronics Technology Group Corp. There's no reason to believe Crozier's remarks are incorrect, because Microsoft has a massive incentive to deliver a version of Windows 10 that China's government will accept. To understand why, consider that China's military has over two million active service personnel, the nation's railways employ similar numbers and Microsoft's partner China Electronics Technology Group Corp has more than 140,000 people on its books. Not all of those are going to need Windows, but plenty will.
Of course Microsoft doesn't need to spy on China, so they can give them a secure Windows 10. The Chinese government is more than capable of spying on their own people anyway. However, there isn't a national security interest in having backdoors in the Chinese version of Windows 10. There aren't any Muslims in China, so they don't face the same terrorism issues that western national do.
Iran got hacked using Windows Xp with no internet connection. Stuxnet style.
Don't start with Windows if you don't have it.
Phuk the US Consumer, they get what we shovel 'em. M$ doesn't play nice do they.
They call it secure, but provide no information about security features. From TFA:
The Register has asked Microsoft to explain the security features of Windows Red, but had not received a reply at the time of writing. You know the drill: we'll update this story if Microsoft sends any information.
...the company is ready to roll out a version of Windows 10 with extra """""security features"""""
FTFY.
So quickly shills, exapand on this. Tell us why there is no spying by Microsoft, yet despite no spying, they produced a version that doesn't spy less on us than the version that already doesn't spy on us. Inquiring minds want to know.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
China could ask Nadella whatever feature they want. 1+ billion potential users have their way..
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
So let's take MS's claims of a more secure Windows at face value.
This means two things. First of all, the Windows they released to the market is unnecessarily insecure, and MS knows that.
Secondly, why would they only offer this enhanced security to the Chinese, and not to the rest of the world?
All software ought to be as secure as possible. If there are security enhancements available, a vendor ought to roll them out to all their users. Here MS is failing in both: Windows can be (much) more secure than it is, and they're not releasing this improvement to the rest of their users.
That, or MS is lying through their teeth to get into China. That may be possible, but while you can say a lot of bad things about the Chinese government, their people by and large are definitely not stupid so there has to be at least some weight to the claims of MS.
I trust Red Star OS more than I do Windows 10.
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made.
Some people don't believe Satan exists. For them, maybe this:
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, says Microsoft should continue selling vulnerabilities to secret agencies of the U.S. government. Unfortunately for the overworked Microsoft employees, the Chinese government wants different vulnerabilities.
You know, if anyone was going to ditch Windows because of secret backdoors, I figured it would have been the Chinese government. Besides, isn't Linux the ideal model for communism? I know they are communists in name only but you would figure they would at least try to keep up the appearance of objecting to capitalism.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I strongly suspect that "secure" in this case does not mean Windows 10 transmits less "telemetry" data, just that it transmit it to servers in China that the Chinese government has unfettered access to. I'd say something snarky but I wouldn't be surprised if the US government starts making similar demands in the next decade, we have to secure our PC's from terrorists after all.
In a few days or weeks when MS releases the Chinese version of Windows Ten, I will look on Baidu and Chinese pirate sites for a copy. The cat will be out of the bag and maybe the world cry will force MS to release a secure and spy free version for the rest of us in the great unwashed masses.
Their flavour was called "Red Flag Linux".
Sadly their attempt was NOT sucessful.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
If you do not like "The Register"'s take on the matter, feel free to use Google for alternative info. But bear in mind that this submission uses TheReg as the main source.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
No Donny, these men are socialists (with a "hybrid" economy). Among other things, true communism doesn't allow for class systems/structure or ownership of private property. This is why any modern "communist" state lasts about as long as it takes the new leadership to come to the conclusion that all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others [*]. Socialism proper went out of vogue in China with the introduction of Special Economic Zones in the '70's. Once government officials realized how much money could be made/grafted off these setups there was no looking back. In the late 90's I was a pre-sales engineer with a sales group for a large multinational and this group handled all the business in China. The level of corruption was staggering. Pretty much every major deal involved handing over a trash bag full of cash to at least one PRC official or a PLA officer at some point. One of the salesmen commented to me that they made governments in South America look like puritans. I understand the situation has improved but corruption is still rampant enough that the government has cracked down a few times on ostentatious displays of wealth, including executing the odd official. In all cases I'm aware of it wasn't so much that the official was taking bribes but rather they were flaunting their wealth that really got them in trouble.
// I'm by no means an expert in the PRC economy or government so take all of this with the request grain of salt.
... here:
https://arstechnica.com/inform...
Especulates that:
***The custom version developed under the joint venture is essentially a custom image of Windows 10 at its core, with a set of policy settings hard-coded for government users. It's not clear if additional code is being added to the image.***
So, they changed some Registry Keys and Group Policies, and you do not have to play wack-a-mole every time an update comes...
Also, please remember that:
*** The Chinese government, like the US government, has been permitted source code review for security purposes in a secured lab at Microsoft's China Information Technology Security Certification Center in Beijing since 2003.***
So, most likely, the chinese already reviewed the telemerty and deemed it non threathening (or negotiated with microsoft to get a copy of it ;-) ).
But5 at this point, all is especulation, only time will tell...
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Isn't this just a version with backdoors the chinese government can use ? I have difficulties believing the chinese government wants their people or even government officials to have a windows version the government itself can not get into.
I just realized, that Windows products must be a gift for nation states, for implementing mass surveillance.
And nobody has to respect laws either, just shuffle the data through some neighbor nation, to whitewash it all.
I have only mistrust for Microsoft Corp.
Haven't Microsoft used silent updates in the past? They, or agencies they answer to, can just revert the changes on the next update, and not even alert you to that the update has been sent to you.
Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 are sad jokes.
Windows is dead.
Face it.
on Linux you need to suid yourself to root to do just about anything,
...said the guy who used to run Windows XP. You know, this OS where the user has admin rights by default, so even normal everyday tasks are done with admin privileges.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I suggest you read up on what sudo is capable off. You can easily setup sudo via its configuration file (/etc/sudoers) that will allow users that require elevated privileges (eg. Database and Web Administrators) to do their work without needing root access.
The parent poster was referring to a different approach to security.
with sudo, you set up a list of commands that a database or web admin can run.
you limit user access by restricting which commands the user can run. But said commands will be run with root privileges.
In case of a bug in the command, you could use it for privileges escalations (*you* were only restricted to run this command. but *this command* runs as root and could do anything).
what the parent refers to is more closely related to the various "CAP_*" capabilities used in the linux kernel.
i.e.: even if you run a command as root, that command would never, even in the case of a bug, reconfigure the network interface, because the corresponding CAP_{blah} capability isn't enabled.
By carefully crafting a very precise set of capabilities that you hand out to administrative programs, you make sure that they only do what they are supposed to do, even if an attacker manage to find a way to force a program running as root to do arbitrary actions.
(It's a bit similar like how some smartphone apps come with a whitelist of API calls that you need to validate before installing : "can access your contacts list", "can access your webcam", etc. Even if the weather app get hacked, it can never be used to spy on you, because it's not whitelisted to access your mic and your cam... Well except that nowadays every single last app seems to be obliged to ask access for nearly anything (Hey, now your Weather app can automatically recognise the city you're travelling into simply by flashing the QR code of your travel ticket ! Needs cam privileges !).
Under Linux the same granularity exists, except that this done at the kernel API level, instead of the Java user libraries like on Android)
In the past few years Windows has been implementing similar restrictions. That's what the poster was referring to.
On Linux, the facility to apply this king of control exist in the kernel too (the various capabilities). But there aren't many software using them. I only know of SELinux and AppArmor. And they are not used system-wide, but only to put specific software into cages (those software for which they have rulesets).
I think this is dues to the fact that the basic user/group access rights of Unix can provide already quite some security if you take the time to organise enough granularity in your groups and memberships, instead of making everything restricted to root-only and needing thus to be root for nearly any action.
(Because of the Unix philosophy, lots of things are represented in unix as files. Therefore, lots of the actions controlled by capability can be mapped to file accesses (e.g.: to device files in /dev/ ). Putting correct group access on files can acheive the same results.
e.g.: a virtual machine might need USB passthrough. One way would be to grant the corresponding capability to it.
The way VirtualBox does it, is that it runs as "vbox" goup, and there's a script that hands out USB devices nodes with that as group access)
In practice, distributions such as Debian have been using tons of specific groups to control access to specific resources precisely, years before SELinux was a thing.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"Microsoft" and "secure" in one sentence.
Windows system will auto-reboot in the name of security update when China deploys it's military troops
The "Security" is not security at all, it's back doors for Chinese officials as they've always demanded of their IT products when sold in china.
Have they considered that unless they trust the compiler, they can't trust that the final product will do what the source code says? What if they are given the source to the compiler, how are they going to trust the compiler they use to compile that? I suppose they could move to an open source compiler, which maybe can be trusted, but of course they won't, they'll use Microsoft's compiler won't they. And if the NSA was really deeply embedded in MS, they could have this all stitched up so that the source code is compiled and doesn't do what it claims to do. Sorry China, you are ignorant and you fail.
Way to go, Microsnot. Consider yourself middle-fingered.
"...the company is ready to roll out a version of Windows 10 with extra security features demanded by China's government."
TRANSLATION:
"...the company is ready to roll out a version of Windows 10 with extra spying features demanded by China's government."
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
See my subject: Who got BITCHSLAPPED & BANNED from the whitehouse by our great President Trump? CNN (arstechnica), lmao...
* Awwww... (not)!
(CNN/Arstechnica = The VERY FAKE news!)
APK
P.S.=> Biggest bunch of punks & underachiever "not men" I ever ran into online (especially Jeremy the WHIMP Reimer, Fatass PIG Jay Little & "GOITERMAN" Peter "not too" Bright)... apk
Windows 10 default security features, such as this keystroke logger, make it unsuitable for many uses. This operating system clearly violates HIPAA and FERPA in the United States.
Earlier this week, CEO of Microsoft Greater China, Alain Crozier, told China Daily that the company is ready to roll out a version of Windows 10 with extra security features demanded by China's government.
It should come with a Dalai Lama desktop pic that can't be changed. Or maybe a rotation with the Tianammen square guy and the tanks. Yeah, that's it.
It looks like you're expressing unorthodox views. We're sending people round to help you with that.
Bwhahahahaahahahahahahahahahaha... you know what that means right? State sponsored monitoring built-in to your OS! It's not more secure lol!
It reports everything and moar to the Chinese government instead!
Please use this software (so we don't have to spend our resources hacking you) ... and welcome to China!
When we saw the keylogger in Win 10 beta, it was obvious where it would lead. Addition of more spying is easy with the configurable Windows 10 spy module.
Windows..Increasing your profits by screwing the people.
(Could someone add these phrases to the technical BS generator?)