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Windows 10 Still Phones Home With Data In Spite of Privacy Settings
Penguinisto writes: According to Ars Technica, Windows 10 will still send telemetry and other data to Microsoft-owned domains — no matter how tightly you crank down the privacy settings. Even with everything buttoned down, Cortana, OneDrive, and Web Search from the Start Menu disabled, the OS still phones home, using a random system ID that persists across reboots. It apparently also tries to bypass proxies to do it. "Some of the traffic looks harmless but feels like it shouldn't be happening. For example, even with no Live tiles pinned to Start (and hence no obvious need to poll for new tile data), Windows 10 seems to download new tile info from MSN's network from time to time, using unencrypted HTTP to do so. ... Other traffic looks a little more troublesome. Windows 10 will periodically send data to a Microsoft server named ssw.live.com. ... The exact nature of the information being sent isn't clear—it appears to be referencing telemetry settings—and again, it's not clear why any data is being sent at all. We disabled telemetry on our test machine using group policies."
Same as the old Microsoft.
Windows 8 was a fuck up because of the UI.
It looks like Microsoft said, with 10, let's just go deeper and fuck up the user's privacy instead.
The more I hear about 10, the less it looks like a saviour to Windows woes and the more it looks like an even bigger disaster.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
No. It's not PEBKAC. Go fucking research. To stop Windows from talking, you need several privacy toggles, some of which won't toggle all the way. Then you need a registry workaround, because Windows is so about user friendliness that you need to modify DWORDS in their shitted up binary fuckfest. Then you need to disable like three services, and remove two binaries. Then you need a big hosts file, and that's becoming an issue because Windows will actually work around a hosts file in some cases, using a list of known IPs specifically to circumvent that. So for now, you can block them on your external firewall.
Eventually, you'll need a dedicated Application Firewall to block all that plus the mandatory Windows Update- you obviously don't want to allow Windows Update unless and until the Application Firewall has updated rules, because we can assume Microsoft will sidestep them weekly if allowed to. The advantage of that approach is that Microsoft can't beat it- it's not on their computer- and further, that you can eventually deep packet inspect and sanitize, allowing the use of Cortana with just the information YOU want to share with her.
Again, really, we need to get off Microcock. This level of drama- needing a second computer to use your first computer- is absolutely insane. But for those that want all those lesser applications that only have Windows support, this will be the option.