Trying Windows 11 "Government Edition"

hello buddy my name is Eric and today we're going to be taking a look at the government version of Windows 11 now if you've been on Tech Twitter you've probably seen some references to this and you you may be wondering so where does it come from what what exactly is it and a lot of people assumed this was a US Government specialized version of Windows but it's actually believed to be made for the Chinese government and that makes sense as to why you would want this over regular ltsc because in addition to the things that ltsc doesn't have it's also much like those questionable gaming isos had its security features removed like Windows Defender now you may think well why would any government want that but the answer is geopolitics because antivirus by Design is going to collect signatures and if it's never seen a file before it's going to upload it that's what automatic sample submission does so of course a foreign government is unlikely to want such a feature so this is the Chinese government solution to be able to use Windows without worrying about geopolitical tensions at least for now I think they are working on a Linux based solution uh so how is it made that was the other thing IID assumed this was just some sort of random leak online but no no it's actually possible to build this it's not released but all of the files are on Microsoft CDN and can be obtained through uup dump. net so we're not just going to talk about it no we're going to try it out and someone here is already got it working and they've sort of noticed the difference features now this is a new trend in the English Community but it seems like the Russians have been on this for a while I found a Russian YouTuber who made a video about this a year ago and the instructions for how to get it set up are on what looks like I I don't know if this is a Russian news site or a Russian version of Reddit Hab bar.com and can be easily translated so now we're going to try and actually get it going so I've got the files I need and I just got to do some modifications Al need to get the English US language pack and for whatever reason uh the way this site works it I think cuz it's cross site it always throws that error but it's fine and then we need uh this tool which you should definitely not run on your main computer but in a VM is fine I think uh that is a script that will actually do the conversion now we need uh the version for this so download that this zip file and he also gives instructions on how you can make your own in case you don't want to download this script some sort of nested zip going on here so I don't know why but I'm just going to bypass that and we put in the install.wim from the uup okay so I assume we need to run the start full Builder admin command and okay and this will Mount the whim and then it will make some modifications that should uh turn it into the whim for our government ISO possibly the most annoying thing using uh Windows terminal apps is for whatever reason sometimes they just freeze until you type a character like there I just was holding at 74% then I hit a and then it worked and now it's made a bunch of changes to this file to make it an Enterprise G Edition and now we've got this new uh install.wim file that's going to have the government Edition okay so how do we make the iso well the method I'm going to use is just to replace the install.wim and the iso built from the regular download there's probably a smarter way of doing it but that's how we're going to do it so we go to sources and then we can see install. win this is where the actual file Zone and that's uh from the retail one so we just Swap this out for the government one okay well there is another way of doing this you don't have to use a ISO to install Windows you can use a a flash drive or of course if you're on a VM you can simply use Rufus cheat mode to flash it and then just modify it that way so that's how we're going to do this okay now with the modified install.wim it should be as simple as booting this to the BIOS booting the installer and then we may be able to finally install the government Edition okay and here's the installer okay it is a new version of setup okay okay let we accept the terms now I think this new version of setup applies to all of 24 H2 so so we're going to give it the unallocated drive and it's got the right text install Windows 11 Enterprise government Edition it still doesn't work and and I don't know if it's because we have a contaminated drive and it's impossible to remove a drive from VMware if you have a TPM for whatever reason so I'm just going to make a new VM and use the installer there we go it was something to do with the fact that it just took over the bootloader so if we install that on a new VM it works also side note the Twitter poster who said that it doesn't have a TPM check is wrong it does I bypassed it using the registry but it does have a TPM check so this is basically well it's actually pretty similar to the gaming isos that I reviewed uh a few days ago except this is official from Microsoft uh but it's still going to have security issues and uh from what I have read it is possible to update it using W sus which is essentially the Enterprise update system but Windows update still won't work so it is very much a slimmed down system that that exists largely for geopolitical reasons okay so now we can just go ahead okay and it's still tries to get us to set up a Microsoft account but we're not going to we can just use domain joining instead which you can do on any business version of Windows and we've even got Telemetry settings okay turn these off but I think they're actually stripped at least that was the claim and I always find it funny how the windows installer checks for updates twice it does checking for updates you do a few things and then it checks again and supposedly it's going to download a bunch okay I'm wrong I guess that it doesn't do Windows update I checked using the terminal whether it had downloaded it doesn't seem to have Edge but it does seem to have Defender otherwise then this is looking pretty much like a standard ltsc okay now we're signing in we are actually about to be on Windows 11 government Edition unless we did something d okay so we got Windows 11 Enterprise G uh can we make that I can't read this giv us more my VM contoso what okay and we don't have the app for that but okay so here we go this is license to Yasuo iwakura or name it didn't ask me for that but I guess okay and it does have some apps unlike uh what happened there the recommended is here uh photos oh it seems to install it from the internet cuz it wasn't pre-shift we can go to about and see if we can find any more information about this so uh Enterprise contoso so I don't know how I got the contoso version uh but there's the G so this is the government version and this doesn't appear to be an ltsc build it's that build version it's got all of this we can see uh what else it doesn't doesn't have now no Edge is a notable exception but it does have Defender oh okay but it doesn't really have Defender so it so it does have the antivirus strip so that's actually very interesting and it's not done by group policy so they've clearly Microsoft for this release have done something a bit custom because if you've seen the packed versions where people edited okay so we have Internet Explorer but it doesn't allow us to use it oh we even have the Microsoft store okay this is a really weird hybrid which makes a lot of sense if this is going to be used on workstation so it's still got some of the things you might want so I know I think Brave is on here so we can install Brave cuz it is extremely hard these days to use a system without a web browser mainly because Mozilla had an FTP that was one way of getting uh Firefox without a browser but they actually shut that down uh yeah we can see that it doesn't doesn't do the Bing searches online so it's not going to have the issue where every single thing you type into the stomp menu uh creates a network request activation I'm almost tempted uh to go to a key reseller and buy an Enterprise key to see if uses the same keys but it probably probably wouldn't work uh so we go actually it doesn't activation oh here we go okay it shows up here oh that's weird so it's almost like Windows am where activation is half broken okay now I got the capture going okay let me get these are just DNS hits TCP local okay so no no network traffic from typing in the start menu which is a good start oh that definitely sent off uh quite a bit of network traffic to a Microsoft IP and it does seem like it's getting I it does seem like it's getting updates see if we can join the windows Insider program we got to turn on diagnostic data which actually isn't totally stripped it does seem to well let's see we can check the box and see if it sends anything but yeah so it does still theoretically have Telemetry server settings all look relatively normal print let's see print spoiler is running and it's automatic not manual so no it's not doing any of the service uh tweaks that some people like to and uh we can go to we can also do we can do the uninstaller so we can see if what apps it actually comes with we get camera calculator family feedback Hub media player 365 Bing search clipchamp news teams to do wow okay we get we get a decent variety although no Candy Crush which I think everyone is happy to be rid of so it's not as lean as ltsc but so it is just a very specialized okay version so on a cold not it's got about 100 processes running Which is less than default Windows but not all that low and it's got 2 GB of RAM in use so the main so it really is just optimized to remove a couple of features that are likely to be undesirable to governments that are not aligned with the US so it makes it makes a lot of sense why this exists I wouldn't go through unless you just wanted to see it I wouldn't go through the effort of actually downloading installing it it's not there's nothing super interesting in here but it's still it's always interesting to look and see and if for whatever reason the exact specifications of this are desired by you for any reason it's available so that's all for now I hope this video was interesting bye

Channel: Eric Parker

Views: 128,743

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Id: KaTuPn2C1zU

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 30 2024