I’m always a bit surprised when I see yet another ‘chinese software/firmware a complete disaster, not even competently malicious.’ story.
It just seems strange compared to say, Russia and the former Soviet republics, where despite the fairly nasty economic collapse and comparatively limited domestic electronics industries, quite a lot of programming talent emerged.
I would have expected that China wouldn’t be obviously worse off than those countries in terms of producing programming talent, and that it would be actively encouraged now that dubious software quality is one of the major factors keeping successful OEM/ODM hardware outfits from becoming internationally successful vendors, rather than just contractors for western companies who supply the badge, localization, and firmware that isn’t a total disaster.
The fact that Baidu’s approach to privacy combines the worst of our marketing analytics weasels and a surveillance state is no surprise; but why that level of lousiness?
