this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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I’m a little confused by what you mean by the “old way”. There is no old way, digital infrastructure is constantly evolving as are threat actors, you can’t use older products and expect them to work nor is there even an older way oftentimes. The national security risk also isn’t for nuclear weapons or CPC internal communiques, it’s for hospitals, smaller firms, individual websites, and so on. Technically anything can be classified as “national security”.
If by old you mean analog? Then that’s not feasible, an analog system would be insanely impractical and cost ineffective. You can’t run a digital economy on an analog system.
China also needed to parlay with foreign firms for sales, development, and so on, they couldn’t just say “Hey wait, we don’t have any digital infrastructure”.
I guess the question is what specific cybersecurity software we're talking about and where it's being used. I agree regarding the civilian sector, it makes sense to use things like western anti virus software in these cases. That said, China's had parity in skills here for at least a decade. So, they definitely let things slide until the actual confrontation started with the US being openly hostile now.