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Microsoft's Telemetry Additions To Windows 7 and 8 Raise Privacy Concerns
WheezyJoe writes: ghacks and Ars Technica are providing more detail about Windows 10's telemetry and "privacy invasion" features being backported to Windows 7 and 8. The articles list and explain some of the involved updates by number (e.g., KB3068708, KB3022345, KB3075249, and KB3080149). The Ars article says the Windows firewall can block the traffic just fine, and the service sending the telemetry can be disabled. "Additionally, most or all of the traffic appears to be contingent on participating in the CEIP in the first place. If the CEIP is disabled, it appears that little or no traffic gets sent. This may not always have been the case, however; the notes that accompany the 3080149 update say that the amount of network activity when not part of CEIP has been reduced." The ghacks article explains other ways block the unwanted traffic and uninstall the updates.
https://github.com/WindowsLies...
Someone is on the case!
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
The funny part is that there was a man who saw all this coming back in the early 90s who nobody listened to. His name is Richard Stallman.
Stallman warned everyone that proprietary software turns on the user in the end. People are complaining that Windows now sucks, and they have all these expensive (closed source too) tools they depend on for their livelihood that can't run on any platform besides Windows. Well, I guess they're getting what's coming to them. Stallman tried to warn them, but they didn't listen because they wanted stuff to "just work". Well, Stallman's inconvenient truth can no longer be ignored.
So have fun Windows users. I hope that your short term gains were worth not solving the problem in an open, portable, way.
The Internet Storm Centre (part of SANS) posts one of these fairly shortly after MS releases the patches. Here's their post for the August patch batch to give you an idea - they don't cover the optional updates at all though.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!