In this edition of Tech Time Warp we go back to April 14, 1995, when the Chinese government began widespread efforts to stop its government agencies from using pirated software. The move came after a Feb. 27, 1995, accord agreement between the U.S. and China in which government officials announced enhanced copyright enforcement measures, including evidence-collecting task forces, increased ability for Chinese customs officers to search for and destroy pirated materials, and removal of quotas on American film imports. According to The New York Times, U.S. officials considered it the “most comprehensive and detailed copyright enforcement agreement…ever negotiated with any country.”
The persistence of piracy
The problem is it wasn’t very effective. Piracy remains a perennial problem around the world and has been particularly rampant in China:
- In October 1995, U.S. officials estimated China had doubled its production of illegal CDs, according to the Los Angeles Times.
- In January 2013, 36-year-old Xiang Li of Chengdu, China, pled guilty to running a website. to people around the world, including a NASA electronics engineer and a U.S. government contractor.
- In 2018, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Fox Business that 90 percent of Chinese companies used Windows. However, only 1 percent of them had paid for it. (Microsoft wasn’t entirely upset about this. Despite the Chinese government’s efforts to push computer users to locally developed open-source Linux operating systems, Microsoft leaned into market supremacy by offering every Chinese Windows user, whether they possessed a licensed copy or not, a free upgrade to Windows 10 in )
What’s really interesting is when cybercriminal meets cybercriminal, as was the case during the 2017 WannaCry attack. All those pirated copies of Windows weren’t receiving regular Microsoft securities updates. This was leading Chinese infrastructure—government agencies, police, and universities, among other entities—to be particularly hard hit by the global ransomware attack. Skipping those security patches, no matter the reason, is a mistake.
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