> but I'm pretty sure a large part of it is protectionism.
Windows has a lot of prestige in China. It's imported from America. It's expensive. Working for Microsoft in China is insanely high-prestige. When non-engineers in China see I'm running Ubuntu they wonder why. Engineers who use Linux at work almost all have Windows machines at home, always a pirated copy.
I'm pretty sure a lot of Chinese bureaucrats are grumbling about this. "Oh now we have to use a crappy Chinese OS. Free is for losers!"
But I'm only surprised that it took this long. China is going to be the biggest economy on the planet. So far China has maintained a degree of autonomy and sovereignty unlike any US ally in the three inner rings of the NSA surveillance hierarchy has.
I expect other governments to follow. Most governments are in a position where they cannot compete with the NSA, domestically or internationally. Most don't have 1% of the NSA's budget for surveillance. They may all wish they could spy on their people like the NSA does, but wishes, horses, etc.
Some will realize that the only way to win is not to play the surveillance game. Instead they will put their resources toward securing their government and enterprise computing, and maybe even securing their populations, by banning US products and services associated with NSA surveillance programs.
I'm sure the NSA would love to ban VPNs, break Wikipedia's encryption and openly have censorship / spying programs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project . But lets be frank, China is far ahead of anything going on in the Western world.
In the US, any hint of censorship or spying is met with extreme resistance. In China, censorship and spying isn't just accepted, its public policy. You can disappear for saying the wrong things on a public blog, and bloggers have developed codewords in response.
And the thing that China has, that the NSA most certainly does NOT have, is support of the public. China continues to make new public programs for censorship and domestic spying year after year, and there doesn't seem to be any stop to them.
China's Ministry of Public Security live listens to your connections and censors certain Wikipedia pages while you're browsing. I mean come on, the differences between China and NSA are incomparable.
The NSA barely can get away with looking at subpoenaed business records before Americans go apeshit crazy about it.
>And the thing that China has, that the NSA most certainly does NOT have, is support of the public.
Public Support? First of all, Chinese government is known to hire internet commentators to show the public is on the government side.
Secondly, if you have read some comments from Sina Weibo (China's twitter), you would know the public don't support, but can't do anything about the censorship. China comes from a era when simply saying the wrong thing against the leader could get you killed. The latest news this month was five prominent Chinese figures has been detained for attending a private meeting discussing the 25th anniversary of 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Also a journalist in her 70s has been detained with her son "on suspicion of leaking state secrets to a foreign entity." Both incidents were reported in this news story:
Windows has a lot of prestige in China. It's imported from America. It's expensive. Working for Microsoft in China is insanely high-prestige. When non-engineers in China see I'm running Ubuntu they wonder why. Engineers who use Linux at work almost all have Windows machines at home, always a pirated copy.
I'm pretty sure a lot of Chinese bureaucrats are grumbling about this. "Oh now we have to use a crappy Chinese OS. Free is for losers!"
But I'm only surprised that it took this long. China is going to be the biggest economy on the planet. So far China has maintained a degree of autonomy and sovereignty unlike any US ally in the three inner rings of the NSA surveillance hierarchy has.
I expect other governments to follow. Most governments are in a position where they cannot compete with the NSA, domestically or internationally. Most don't have 1% of the NSA's budget for surveillance. They may all wish they could spy on their people like the NSA does, but wishes, horses, etc.
Some will realize that the only way to win is not to play the surveillance game. Instead they will put their resources toward securing their government and enterprise computing, and maybe even securing their populations, by banning US products and services associated with NSA surveillance programs.