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All Microsoft Updates Phone Home

Posted by samzenpus on from the always-watching-you dept.

juct writes "In the wake of heise Security's report on the garrulous WGA Notification, Microsoft has now supplied additional details on the data sent. They have revealed to developers that apparently all updates relay information to the company in Redmond."

3 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No by asphaltjesus · · Score: 5, Informative

    My firewall detects the connections after doing manual installs. I know this because I've got production equipment we can't just let windows auto-update on. Based on my experience, WGA is just one of many apps/updates that phones home.

    Again, it's been this way for quite a while, and the information does not "perfectly" identify you, but each install has it's own signature as far as I can tell so they can deduce who you are pretty quickly.

    Why do you care now as opposed to all of the other Microsoft's-evil-OS stories on /.?

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  2. List of data sent back by trianglman · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the WGA Blog

    • Source ID (which product is requesting an update) - necessary to get the right patches
    • Event Code - Not sure what sort of events this is tracking, curious, but not necessarily evil
    • Version - I assume this means version of the updater, but could mean version of the base software, either way see #1
    • Hash of the event - good security check
    • Custom Data - completely unexplained, this is what worries me the most in the list
    • Return Code - ok from a usability standpoint (most websites track when users leave, so I put this in the same class as that)
    • Part of a domain? - no reason for this to be sent, as far as I can see
    • Partial binary product key - piracy reasons? Can't think of any other good reason for this
    • WPA hash - also unexplained, but probably related to the above
    • OS version - see #1
    • User locale ID (langauge) - reasonable if they are presenting nationalized dialogs, removes a prompt from the user
    • System locale ID (computer default language) - don't see much of a reason for this except as a backup for the first, odd
    • Diagnostic code - reasonable for debugging
    • Client Id - i.e. GUID - why do they get this if they aren't using it for user tracking
    • HD volume serial - no reason for this, except user identification
    • Computer security hash - see above
    Other than those last identifiers, most of the information I see requested make sense.
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  3. Re:Simple solution by schwit1 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Doesn't Windows ignore the HOSTS files when it suits them?

    http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/16/13 51217