Their past dramas are irrelevant to this issue.

Giving into a straw man argument such as their other dramas somehow devalue what’s going on now, only plays into the French propaganda campaign.

Not as bad a taste as the French government is giving me.

If its do I trust GOS or a confirmed pro chat control governments side of the story, its an easy choice.

Don’t bring data you are not ok with a foreign government forcing you to handover. That’s the simplest solution.

Back all your important data up, then wipe your phone before you go. Same with the laptop. You can’t be coerced into giving something you don’t have.

Threat modeling is important. If your just an average Joe being a tourist it is highly unlikely the Chinese government is going to take your devices to search.

Source: travelled to China for an extended period of time.

Based on basic security principles. There is not a real security expert out there that would ever tell you to not update. Leaving a backdoor in your network as a “honeypot” is an absolutely awful idea.

You are also conflating security updates with feature updates. Please take a look at the different terminology.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/installing-updates-features-roles/standard-terminology-software-updates

Anyway if you really hate all the bloat of Windows there is a wide variety of other operating systems to choose from that also offer security updates.

It is pretty much always more dangerous to not update. The internet is an extremely hostile environment (from a security perspective). You really should avoid having devices that are not updated or EOL connected to it.