China Dumping Foreign Tech; It Could Work

Larry Seltzer | ZDNet | December 22, 2014

The Chinese government has been working for a long time on replacing foreign, largely American, technology with home-grown alternatives, but conditions are much better for them than in the past.

According to Bloomberg News, China is accelerating their efforts to remove all foreign technology "from banks, the military, state-owned enterprises and key government agencies by 2020." Bloomberg cites "people familiar with the effort."

There have been many reports of this type for years, largely having to do with custom Linux distributions. Such is the case today as well, with NeoKylin slated to replace Microsoft Windows. Some might disagree, but I think that these have always been inadequate due to inadequate applications software.

The difference now is cloud and other Internet software. You don't need to do a whole lot with the host operating system when cloud-based software is available. From one 1984-ish viewpoint, locally-running software is all a risk, and the more that's in the cloud the better for surveillance purposes...