Microsoft announces new custom version of Windows 10 for Chinese govt agencies
24 May 2017
Tech giant Microsoft has announced a new custom version of Windows 10 which will be used by Chinese government agencies.
The Windows 10 China Government Edition is based on Windows 10 Enterprise Edition, which already comes with many of the security, identity, deployment, and manageability features required by governments and enterprises.
"The China Government Edition will use these manageability features to remove features that are not needed by Chinese government employees like OneDrive, to manage all telemetry and updates, and to enable the government to use its own encryption algorithms within its computer systems," IANS quoted Terry Myerson, executive vice president, Windows and Devices Group, as stating in a blog post.
The company added that Lenovo will be among the first OEM partners to preinstall Windows 10 China Government Edition on new devices.
"Windows 10 is the most secure version of Windows ever, and we are humbled that governments around the world like the US Department of Defence, the Australian Health Department, and the Italian Ministry of Defence are choosing Windows 10 for their security, and now the Chinese government has a version of Windows created specifically for it," added Myerson.
China Customs, the city of Shanghai, and China government-controlled IT company Westone Information Technology are the first customers for the new software. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, this was the first time Microsoft had built a custom version of Windows for China.
Meanwhile, according to commentators, the debut of a tweaked version of Windows for China underscored the travails of US technology companies doing business in that country. For instance, under an upcoming Chinese cyber security bill, foreign technology companies would need to share the underlying software code of their products with government inspectors. According to the Chinese government, it needed to see the software code, which was usually proprietary, in order to verify that there were no flaws that hackers could exploit.
