Post by Mr. Man-wai ChangDoes US Government have a special edition of Micro$oft Windows 10 and 11?
I am just curious.
In the old MS DOS days, some software including games did indeed have US Edition and International Edition. :)
Netscape, for instance. It was about encryption strength. I remember we had to get a permission to use more bits in encryption, which banks required.
The French has an outright ban on encryption, so there had to be some
allowance for that too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography_law
I see on that page, that one item still promotes the idea of 40 bit encryption,
which is weak sauce, and no real protection at all. It's like Googles ability
(if they wanted), to break into the weaker variants of WinZIP password protection
on attached files. They should be able to crack the old protections in under
one second. Things that use AES128 (elliptic curve?) should be a bit
better.
As for the original question, yes, there are versions of the OS that
have some items removed. The Ignite conference video, describes a feature
suited to the handling of Top Secret materials, and that would be a thing
in a government version of an OS. But the trick there, is that needs manual
assistance from IT people (to "mark" materials with higher security settings).
That is too clumsy a process, for usage in other environments. Basically
what that implements, is you cannot copy/paste text from a document
marked Top Secret, into an email tool. The Paste buffer is empty.
The best way to make Windows secure, is to remove the more crapulent parts of it.
It's possible there is no default browser on the government OS. The browser then,
is whatever the IT department says it is. And the Telemetry would have an OFF setting :-)
Paul