Huawei's Android-free PC alternative for Windows will reportedly ship later this year with a macOS-inspired design

[Windows Central]

Huawei might get back to developing its own operating system — HarmonyOS Next for PC to compete with Windows later this year.

Huawei's Android-free PC alternative for Windows will reportedly ship later this year with a macOS-inspired design : Read more

 

[GraniteStateColin]

People outside China should not use an operating system from China. This is a national security risk. Just as long-standing exploits are found years later in Windows, Linux, and even Cisco hardware, holes and exploits that are known to the Chinese government can be buried in any of the Chinese equipment or software without being found by researchers in other countries.

China can, and we should assume will, use these to gather information on people in other countries, use them to deliver malware to other systems on the network, or have it as a trigger where they can crush the communication infrastructure in other countries in the event of a conflict. Hopefully, none of these will ever matter or happen, but because of the risk, unless you live in China, you should avoid Chinese tech devices and software, especially if you live in a country known to have a potentially adversarial relationship with China, like the U.S., Taiwan, India, and other such countries.

 

[fjtorres5591]

This is most likely a domestic use only product.
Rather lije Red Star Linux.
Given how much they are cooying Apple, they'd better not distribute to any country with Trade Dress IP laws. Apple will sue them out of that market.

 

[GraniteStateColin]

This is most likely a domestic use only product.
Rather lije Red Star Linux.
Given how much they are cooying Apple, they'd better not distribute to any country with Trade Dress IP laws. Apple will sue them out of that market.

Good point. Probably not being developed to compete abroad, but to get Chinese customers and users out of paying license fees to American (or any non-Chinese) companies.

 

[fjtorres5591]

Good point. Probably not being developed to compete abroad, but to get Chinese customers and users out of paying license fees to American (or any non-Chinese) companies.

...plus Keeping the company afloat without western tech.

You can't serve two masters, your government and the paying customers simultaneously. Note how both MS and Apple regularly butt heads with overreaching governent aparatchicks in the US and other countries. Their primary focus is serving their customers as best they can. They accomodate the bureaucrats but only up to a point.

Huawei serves the CCP, first and formost, customers be da**ed.
(Keeps them.out of jail, don'cha know? )
That works in China but not in the major tech markets.

 

[praz01]

People outside China should not use an operating system from China. This is a national security risk. Just as long-standing exploits are found years later in Windows, Linux, and even Cisco hardware, holes and exploits that are known to the Chinese government can be buried in any of the Chinese equipment or software without being found by researchers in other countries.

China can, and we should assume will, use these to gather information on people in other countries, use them to deliver malware to other systems on the network, or have it as a trigger where they can crush the communication infrastructure in other countries in the event of a conflict. Hopefully, none of these will ever matter or happen, but because of the risk, unless you live in China, you should avoid Chinese tech devices and software, especially if you live in a country known to have a potentially adversarial relationship with China, like the U.S., Taiwan, India, and other such countries.

This simply didn't age well. It seems Microsoft is the biggest risk to your business out there at the moment with banks, airlines and governments out of service right now. When the dust settles from the last few days we will likely see a very different ways of working landscape where productivity will move away from OSes to SaaS services, so customers are able to continue operating when their unreliable operating system fails them. It's also less likely they will pander to the whims of cyber security, given end-point protection has cost most companies more money over the last few days than they could have ever potentially saved.

 

[fjtorres5591]

This simply didn't age well. It seems Microsoft is the biggest risk to your business out there at the moment with banks, airlines and governments out of service right now. When the dust settles from the last few days we will likely see a very different ways of working landscape where productivity will move away from OSes to SaaS services, so customers are able to continue operating when their unreliable operating system fails them. It's also less likely they will pander to the whims of cyber security, given end-point protection has cost most companies more money over the last few days than they could have ever potentially saved.

A common day one reaction.

Unfortunately, the facts don't bear this out.

The issue has nothing to do with the OS but with poor quality control at CLOUDSTRIKE, which led to this (previously) trusted supplier of mission-critical software deploying a corrupted/bad updated kernel level driver that prevented the OS from completing bootup.

As it turns out, the OS itself offers a simple fix: boot up in local-only Safe mode and using Recovery roll back the system to the last known good configuration, or if you don't have recovery files (a bad practice, generally) manually delete the corrupt file.

This kind of issue has nothing to do with the idea of local computing or anything other than GIGO and quality control. It happens all the time with software on all platforms including SAAS products. (Hosting services suffer their own outages regularly.)

Pretending that orgs should abandon local server systems in a full embrace of remote mainframes is no different that claiming the ISS must be abandoned because Boeing's STARLINER QA produced a buggy flawed vehicle.

You might be justified in switching to a different mission critical software supplier or use more than one supplier (as NASA does in the access to space sector) but not in abandoning an effective system. You just need better risk mitigation policies.

For single user systems, this means things like automated cloud backup and recovery files. There are no silver bullets and no bulletproof solution. Just good risk mitigation.

GIGO rules.

 

[praz01]

A common day one reaction.

Unfortunately, the facts don't bear this out.

The issue has nothing to do with the OS but with poor quality control at CLOUDSTRIKE, which led to this (previously) trusted supplier of mission-critical software deploying a corrupted/bad updated kernel level driver that prevented the OS from completing bootup.

As it turns out, the OS itself offers a simple fix: boot up in local-only Safe mode and using Recovery roll back the system to the last known good configuration, or if you don't have recovery files (a bad practice, generally) manually delete the corrupt file.

This kind of issue has nothing to do with the idea of local computing or anything other than GIGO and quality control. It happens all the time with software on all platforms including SAAS products. (Hosting services suffer their own outages regularly.)

Pretending that orgs should abandon local server systems in a full embrace of remote mainframes is no different that claiming the ISS must be abandoned because Boeing's STARLINER QA produced a buggy flawed vehicle.

You might be justified in switching to a different mission critical software supplier or use more than one supplier (as NASA does in the access to space sector) but not in abandoning an effective system. You just need better risk mitigation policies.

For single user systems, this means things like automated cloud backup and recovery files. There are no silver bullets and no bulletproof solution. Just good risk mitigation.

GIGO rules.

I couldn't work out the point you were driving at but I got the general feeling that you think that it will return to business as usual. I couldn't disagree more. When you're dealing with an incident of this magnitude there is one thing that is for certain. Things will change! 8 million computers were affected most at enterprise level. When I return to work tomorrow, the following will take place in the following order.
1. Impact assessment to understand which systems are still not operational. The workaround you mentioned is not a solution across a fleet of 10000 systems. Also LKGC doesn't fix this, you have to go down recovery option then delete offending files. Critical systems will hopefully be back up now but it's going to be weeks before everything is back up.
2. Review of compensation to recoup losses. Any back up strategies RTO/RPO would not have mitigated operational downtime of this magnitude. All redundancies were out as well. For realtime data systems such as financial services the RTO/RPO is unacceptable. Only Mac and Linux systems were unaffected.
3. Tactical controls will be drafted. Staggered rollout of updates. DR kept back from latest/greatest release. Better SLAs with vendors. Etc.
4. Strategic planning and risk assessment where expensive consultants will be bought in who will look at the data and identify that organisations that decentralised their IT systems and adopted modern ways of working came out on top will recommend just that. Tell me one SaaS service that was down (you said SaaS services aren't immune).

So in short there will be divestment away from OS based productivity in favour of SaaS. E.g. migration from SAP to Salesforce ERP.

 

[Ron-F]

People outside China should not use an operating system from China. This is a national security risk. Just as long-standing exploits are found years later in Windows, Linux, and even Cisco hardware, holes and exploits that are known to the Chinese government can be buried in any of the Chinese equipment or software without being found by researchers in other countries.

China can, and we should assume will, use these to gather information on people in other countries, use them to deliver malware to other systems on the network, or have it as a trigger where they can crush the communication infrastructure in other countries in the event of a conflict. Hopefully, none of these will ever matter or happen, but because of the risk, unless you live in China, you should avoid Chinese tech devices and software, especially if you live in a country known to have a potentially adversarial relationship with China, like the U.S., Taiwan, India, and other such countries.

However, China is an important business partner in many countries, especially — but not exclusively — in Africa. Added the fact there is a strong isolationism movement in the US, there is a chance to a China made OS find a breach into international market.

Regarding the possibility of Chinese spying in your computer, many cases of CIA shenanigans kind of weaken the case for US developed software.

 

[TheFerrango]

I can finally give my data to the chinease instead of having americans monopolising them.
At any rate, this will be good if anything because China's massive size means it will have a huge market share and finally give Microsoft some credible copetition.

 

[GraniteStateColin]

This simply didn't age well. It seems Microsoft is the biggest risk to your business out there at the moment with banks, airlines and governments out of service right now. When the dust settles from the last few days we will likely see a very different ways of working landscape where productivity will move away from OSes to SaaS services, so customers are able to continue operating when their unreliable operating system fails them. It's also less likely they will pander to the whims of cyber security, given end-point protection has cost most companies more money over the last few days than they could have ever potentially saved.

Wrong. CrowdStrike was at fault. In fact, it may even be that the only reason CrowdStrike was able to cause this problem is because the EU (in a somewhat China-like action) didn't let MS keep the security locked down, forcing them to open this up to competitors. You can argue that there are benefits to the forced opening of parts of the OS and government meddling, but there are also downsides as what just happened with CrowdStrike.

 

[GraniteStateColin]

However, China is an important business partner in many countries, especially — but not exclusively — in Africa. Added the fact there is a strong isolationism movement in the US, there is a chance to a China made OS find a breach into international market.

Regarding the possibility of Chinese spying in your computer, many cases of CIA shenanigans kind of weaken the case for US developed software.

There is NOT a mainstream isolationist movement in the US (yes, some people support this, but it's mostly misreported). What we do have is a movement against one-sided tariffs and laws that make it difficult for the US to sell goods in those countries. All the tariffs and import/export laws that many describe for political reasons as "isolationist" are leverage to force other countries to open trade. This is a fundamental difference from isolationism, where the goal would be to reduce trade with other nations. The US wants more, just free on both sides.

It's just that before this change, the U.S. was practicing unilateral disarmament in a trade war where other countries punished US sellers, while the US, in the name of free trade (which I rabidly support) did nothing to discourage this. What the U.S. began doing under Trump was trying to force freer trade by punishing countries that had policies to keep out US goods.

 

[GraniteStateColin]

Regarding the possibility of Chinese spying in your computer, many cases of CIA shenanigans kind of weaken the case for US developed software.

Huge difference. The Chinese government is a totalitarian regime. Its primary objective is the preservation of its own power.

Most other countries' governments have a primary objective of serving the people that elect them. Corruption obviously distorts this, but corrupt individuals act in private ways to increase their own personal wealth or power. They don't use the levers of government intelligence against individual citizens of other countries. It's not that they wouldn't if it helped them acquire wealth or power, but this would require a large conspiracy to achieve and typically doesn't confer much benefit to the corrupt party.

I don't much care if Germany or India or US government monitors communications for information on terrorist attacks, because I know they can't use it against me. In the US, at least, we have a judicial system with rules for presentation of evidence, where evidence obtained without a warrant or via certain other permissible means is simply inadmissible in court, and without a court conviction, I'm a free citizen -- free by default, innocent unless PROVEN guilty (the opposite of life in a totalitarian state). But they can still use the data acquired to stop terrorist attacks. I'm OK with that.

This is not to say I like the idea of any government monitoring me (I do not and avoid giving even my government info to the greatest extent possible), but there is a night and day difference between a democratically elected government's use of computer data and a totalitarian regime's. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have teams of people who scour the Internet looking for posts that could be harmful to their regimes and taking actions to discredit or diminish those posts.

Similarly, if you buy hardware or software from China, it is reasonable to worry that it includes an ability for China to take control of that device if it decides that to be in its strategic interest. Even if the US government has similar military objectives, the tech is not developed under the eyes of the government, so they (typically the NSA, not the CIA, but some overlap) would need to hack it the same as any third-party government or private entity. So, yes, the NSA may have an ability to hack every Cisco device, but if so, it's only because they are sitting on a zero-day attack that they discovered and are keeping it to themselves. For the Chinese equivalent, the government could require backdoors of all Chinese companies (who all exist only at the pleasure of the Chinese government), and there's plenty of reason to believe they do exactly that.

 

[GraniteStateColin]

I can finally give my data to the chinease instead of having americans monopolising them.
At any rate, this will be good if anything because China's massive size means it will have a huge market share and finally give Microsoft some credible copetition.

Big difference between a country who uses spycraft to steal intellectual property to assist their own companies defeat international competitors, while at the same time keeping wages artificially low through currency manipulation, using the difference to bolster the power of those in government AND free companies in democratically elected and capitalist societies whose sole purpose is to make ever-better products to solve problems and beat their competition in a free market.

Taiwan's TSMC has beaten US companies on chipmaking, which is fine. No objection to Taiwanese products. China (along with Russia, North Korean, and Iran as fellow totalitarian states) is the problem because of the goals and actions of their government. My only concern with TSMC is that China will use its military might to invade and take over Taiwan, handing TSMC's success to the Chinese government. But as long as the competition is coming from a free country, Taiwan, India, Mexico, the EU, UK, etc., and there are not laws or tariffs prohibiting free trade, then let the best company win.

Microsoft has lots of competition and has lost in areas where it was once dominant (mobile, web browsing) and conversely has beaten competitors in areas where it was once not even a player (cloud computing, AI). The waxing and waning of success, dominance, and failure is what forces companies in free and capitalist societies to focus on creating, updating, and delivering products that people want, not what serves the wishes of a government focused on preserving and escalating its own power.