In 2019, the US Department of Commerce put Huawei on an “Entity List”, which banned it from dealing with any US company. The move led Google to revoke Huawei’s Android license, among other repercussions. Then, Huawei developed its own OS, HarmonyOS, for phones, tablets.
Wang Chenglu, former Huawei executive and now CEO of Shenzhen Kaihong Digital Industry Development, recently revealed on Weibo (Chinese social media) that HarmonyOS will be coming to PCs.
When someone had asked if a PC version of Hongmeng will be released next year, Chenglu responded with a “Yes” to indicate that a HarmonyOS PC variant is planned for 2024. It is worth noting that HarmonyOS is called Hongmeng in China, and OpenHarmony for PC is available to some testers.
HarmonyOS is an interesting beast in that it’s much more than just “a modified Android”, as its Wikipedia page details. Even if it never gains a foothold in the west, its potential in China is massive, and big enough to become a serious contender regardless of what we here in the west think of it. I love the gusto of bringing it to the PC, too, and aside from reservations I have about using an operating system developed by one of the many extensions of the Chinese government, I’m actually quite interested in using one of the HarmonyOS smartphones.
So we have apparently switched back to praising China instead if bashing them.
Friendly reminder: China is the worst nation on Earth. All if their tech only exists because they stole the IP from the West.
Harmony OS is most likely filled with spyware and backdoors for the CCP to spy on both private citizens and corporations.
Do not touch Harmony OS (Android rip-off) and do not let your friends get bought over by the mindless China propaganda NPCs.
I would not say that China is the worst nation on Earth. I certainly agree though that we should tread very lightly using a Chinese OS.
If you exclude the small “banana republics” and other extreme dictatorships like North Korea and Myanmar and only say include the top 50 economies, I’d probably put China at the top. But hey we are grading on curve and. I would grade few nations as “good”. We saw the the authoritarian power grab and silence of criticism during the pandemic in CCP like way in the entire western world. That should scare us all.
Tyman,
I’m also worried about the growth of authoritarianism in my own backyard. I try not to be too judgemental on issues of the left/right, liberal/conservative, etc. But frankly it’s terrifying that so many people are willing to embrace authoritarianism when it’s taken hold over their own party. Do they not see how badly dictatorships go for human rights in other countries? I think many of them are blinded by hatred of the opposite party to the point where they’re willing to use their votes on a tyrant, but such people are playing right into the hands of would-be dictators. A younger me wouldn’t have thought it possible here in the US, but if the US does succumb to dictatorship, I can see now this is the path that gets us there.
Well, the US was already a totalitarian state. In some states like California, you will have your religious belief stripped out of you in favor of LGBTQ or wokeness propaganda.
> I certainly agree though that we should tread very lightly using a Chinese OS.
I certainly agree with that assessment although its incomplete. Why would you want to threat ANY OS of any origin lightly?
In my opinion its a mistake to take sides. There are no side, only players.
sj87,
I dislike the Chinese government, they oppress democracy, have been passing highly regressive laws, break their own treaties (ie Hong Kong). Do I trust China? No. So please understand I don’t want to play the whataboutism card just to distract from real issues with China. However the truth is own governments cannot be trusted on surveillance either. Our government tried to bug all encryption devices with key escrow features.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
I guess we may get some solace in knowing that public backlash killed it, but the government didn’t give up, their surveillance initiatives merely went off the radar. More secretive programs, wiretapping, intrusions into private corporate networks, etc. Many of these violated the constitution and we know about these thanks to Snowden and other whistleblowers. Yet the only people who have to fear going to prison are the whistleblowers, nobody complicit in US spy programs has ever been charged. I believe the situation is similar for all the five eyes countries.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-56970640
Western governments spend public tax dollars on signals intelligence agencies like the NSA to build up a catalog of hardware and software vulnerabilities to infiltrate devices and networks for the purposes of spying. So while I’m completely on board with your bringing attention to these types of risks, I’m not really a fan of this being framed as a chinese issue.
Since I haven’t been keeping up on them, has Huawei ever actually been caught planting backdoors or spyware (more-so than google/apple/microsoft/etc do)? I’m genuinely curious.
The difference that the public sphere in the west:
– cares about privacy and surveillance
– still has competing journalists willing to keep it informed (despite recent deterioration)
– its backlashes do have impact
– governments mostly follow the law and can be coerced if they don’t. Ultimately can even be sued.
These are qualitative differences that still put the West apart,
dsmogor,
We say we care, but our actions in the west can be ignorant, both in terms of personal data security and even at the polls. People are very reliant on too few providers, this centralization creates massive attack services, which drastically increase our risks. And corporations aren’t allowed to defy court orders or gag orders such as issued by the secret FISA court. Hence the idea behind “canaries”…
https://readwrite.com/canary-watch-gag-orders-national-security-letter/
Yes I’m glad we still have freedom of the press. The 1st amendment is so important. Although to be honest the “impact” of reporting still leaves a lot to be desired. The government can just wait out the news cycle. Despite all the public outrage after snowden, there were hardly any consequences for those involved. Do you really believe they stopped any of it? No of course not.
I recall some people trying that but their cases couldn’t get a footing. They agency heads simply denied it all in front of congress and not a single person has been held accountable. The government have very powerful tools to deter whistleblowing and you may recall the ATT wiretapping case the government gave everyone involved legal immunity and that was that. So suing the government may be a fantasy. They will and have claimed national security to avoid testimony. This is happening in the modern US. Over time everybody forgets about it and moves on while the government surveillance apparatus continues unabated.
Fortunately we aren’t completely helpless. Encrypted protocols and services have become more accessible and normalized, which helps to stop large scale fishing expeditions. But even with encryption we’re generally still very vulnerable to leaky “meta data”, which the government deems non-private. And although targeted surveillance is much less likely, they can use the aforementioned metadata to cast wide nets beyond their suspects.
Authoritarianism is significantly worse in china, I’ll grant you that. But in terms of secretive spy agencies, I think things are more similar than most of us care to admit. The funny thing is, when we talk US spying, many people have convinced themselves “you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide”, but the Chinese will get a much bigger share of the blame. I just find this double standard kind of hypocritical.
Yeah, China may be bad, but current Russia is a million times worse PERIOD.
I was looking at FydeOS as an interesting chromeos alternative to run on a mini pc the other day. While I can admire the developer accomplishments, yeah the Chinese ccp presence disqualifies it from any production use. Don’t get me wrong all the western software companies spy on us too but the Chinese start on that premise rather than worming their way in.
Would be nice to see some pictures. If it’s just a port of their custom Android to x86, it’s probably going to be some sort of ChromeOS.
ChromeOS isn’t really Android, but something between that and Android on a table its likely where this would end up. The proof is in the pudding and like Thom willing to give it a shot on a VM just to see if there are any interesting ideas.
I’m also not 100% convinced this is anything new. What is a “PC” these days? To the younger kids a tablet with a keyboard is a PC.
I didn’t literally mean ChromeOS. I’m referring to some sort of web-app based system.
I wish Android had done to the desktop/laptop market what it did to the smartphone market. Microsoft would be crying. I remember at one point, people were saying that Android was going to take the PC by storm; you can run Android on a PC, and I did it myself, but it didn’t catch on at all with the public and unfortunately, it went nowhere.
I have no worries or concerns about the Chinese government or Chinese companies spying on me. As an American, all of the big companies here (and my government), are just as bad. At least the Chinese have zero jurisdiction over me, and since I’m a nobody and not a politician or celebrity, foreign entities have no reason to care about me at all beyond ad targeting.
I am with you kbd, my last phone was an high end Huawei (one of the last with android) and it was such a well designed and built device, with Android well customized. Also the Matebook notebook from Huawei are superb.
We are monitored, You can choose (maybe..) who is in charge…