I know most of you are not going to like this, but a nice piece in the Wall Street Journal today says Microsoft is making a version of Windows 10 just for China. It will implement some of the required controls for government access to citizens of China - and anyone else who uses their software- which includes access to any user and the content of their systems. If it follows its own policies, discovered in analyses done on web browsers in China, it may also include some interesting and very intrusive information like the WIFI links around the user, the serial number of hard drives on the computer, the physical location of the device, the unique identifier for the device, and a number of things that one wonders how any intelligence service could store. Microsoft is not saying what controls they are giving to the government nor what changes they have made. The public reaction to that would probably not be good for business, since privacy - even someone else's privacy - can be a sticky issue.
Microsoft is being misunderstood by those criticizing this new product. It has a billion potential customers in the country, though fully 2/3 of them still get pirated software of some sorts. When President Obama invited a Chinese delegation to discuss trade issues, that was among the items he mentioned. It did no good to discuss it. Microsoft figures something is better than nothing, which is a good business attitude for a company that doesn't care what the Chinese do with their products. Why should it be Microsoft's concern that their products become tools to collect intelligence and monitor a population according to Chinese laws? This is strictly for censorship the Chinese will say. They are allowed to censor their own citizens. You have to give it to Microsoft on that.
China says this is for use in China, but the Chinese make a good many of the computers in the world and they can make them with this software for a number of countries. For reasons that are hard to explain, the Chinese believe that policies they set are binding on the rest of the world. We won't be able to tell whether this version is being used or another less intrusive version for the international market. Microsoft can probably help with that, since allowing that to happen will hurt the bottom line on software sales everywhere in the world. Somewhere in the software development labs, there must be a way to identify this new version and make sure it isn't used outside China. Isn't there?
The Chinese swear they are only interested in having this version of software because they are concerned that some nefarious characters may have backdoors in the software and they can't control it. That is perfectly rational, since they know for sure if backdoors are needed they have their own. I tend to see Microsoft's view of this since the Chinese have been stealing their products for years and this is a chance to license something that they won't steal. Both China and Microsoft will embrace it.
Just in case you thought this was a new, brilliant idea by Microsoft, Bill Gates who ran Microsoft then, offered to provide a version of Windows and the complete Office suite to the Defense Department. We were concerned many years ago about the updates Microsoft was sending out. Those would end and a special version would be made just for Defense. They thought about it for few days, then said No thanks. Any guess as to why?
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