Amid the trade war and ongoing political dispute between China and the US, Beijing has decided to replace the Windows operating system on computers used by the Chinese military with another one that will be developed for this purpose.
Although there has been no official announcement from Chinese government media outlets yet, Kanwa Asian Defensemagazine reported on China's plans, according to which Chinese military officials do not intend to switch from Windows to Linux, but will develop a new custom operating system.
Senior Beijing officials know from leaks by Snowden, Shadow Brokers and Vault7 that the US has a powerful arsenal of hacking tools, with which they can access everything from smart TVs to Linux servers and from routers to common desktop operating systems such as Windows and Mac.
Following these revelations, the Chinese government decided to take action and create a custom operating system that would prevent foreign hackers, mainly from the US, from accessing it.
The process of developing the new operating system and replacing Windows will be carried out by an “Internet Security Information Leadership” group, according to the Epoch Times.
In the late 1990s, North Korea also developed a custom operating system for use within the country, called Red Star OS. The operating system still exists, a Linux distribution, but it never became the “only” official operating system for government agencies, which continued to use Windows, Mac, and Linux in parallel.
