Even With Telemetry Disabled, Windows 10 Talks To Dozens of Microsoft Servers (voat.co)

An esteemed reader writes: Curious about the various telemetry and personal information being collected by Windows 10, one user installed Windows 10 Enterprise and disabled all of the telemetry and reporting options. Then he configured his router to log all the connections that happened anyway. Even after opting out wherever possible, his firewall captured Windows making around 4,000 connection attempts to 93 different IP addresses during an 8 hour period, with most of those IPs controlled by Microsoft. Even the enterprise version of Windows 10 is checking in with Redmond when you tell it not to — and it's doing so frequently.

Comments

Surprised?

[gstoddart]

Is anybody surprised by this?

Microsoft has pretty clearly telegraphed they don't give a shit about what the people who own the machines want, and they're going to do whatever the fuck they want.

That Microsoft is doing this is surprising in no way to me.

Microsoft simply can't be trusted to not just do what they please here.

Re:Surprised?

[sims 2]

Performance wise yes with enough resources it was fine. But the oem's never sold stock systems with "enough" for the entire time vista was on the market.
The low end systems today with windows 10 still don't have the power to make vista work as intended.
Plus i've never encountered a windows vista system with more than 4GB stock memory most came with just 2GB or less.
Windows 7 handles it a bit better. However there is currently a bug with the windows update process and any system with less than 4GB of memory will page out to disk while trying to install the second set of 124 updates. Msft hasn't admitted to that yet either though.

Imho no one anywhere should even have the option to buy a new windows system with less than 4GB.

Re:Surprised?

[Midnight Thunder]

No I was surprised that they were able to stay in business after the launch of vista and the windows 8 disaster.

Given the alternatives, I am not surprised people have stayed with them. Not, because the alternatives are bad, but because of the investment in terms of money and human skill sets.

The real alternatives are MacOS and Linux, but they have their own issues. MacOS limits your hardware choice to one company, even if some may argue it is the 'more user friendly OS' and Linux still doesn't feel like it has the user facing polish it could have, then add to the fact that there doesn't seem to be a desktop UI that seems to have a strong continual investment in improving the experience that the lowest common denominator of uses would appreciate.

The way I see it:
    - Linux is a great server OS, but weak on the desktop
    - MacOS is strong on the desktop, but weak on the server
    - Windows is average everywhere

The above also indicates why I believe many companies choose Windows: it may not be the best at anything, but works well enough for must general use cases and allow companies to deal with one vendor and not need a high level of expertise.

Re:Surprised?

[Archtech]

There's a strange type of inertia that applies to large companies. Even when they completely screw the pooch, they tend to hang on for years and years after the fact.

The bigger and more hierarchical the company, the greater the power of groupthink. It gets so that nobody who tells the truth and talks about the real facts and figures can survive within about five levels of management of the executive suite. Anyone who does immediately gets the bum's rush: incompetence, insubordination, bad judgement, blamed for someone else's incompetence or malfeasance, face doesn't fit, socially inept, politically incorrect... the list goes one for ever.

Hence the top management never gets to hear the truth; everything they do is praised to the skies. And they start to think they are wonderful, too, until they hit the wall at 90 mph. Sorry to Godwin, but Hitler was one of the all-time classic examples. For years he kept firing the best generals until he was surrounded by mediocre yes-men; then he probably wondered why nobody could get anything done.

If the truth were known, our corporations are infested by thousands of would-be Hitlers who lack what it takes even to be a petty tyrant.

Re:Surprised?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Mac OS limits your hardware choice to one company, even if some may argue it is the 'more user friendly OS'

I believe we can say Apple is not user's money friendly.

Perhaps they don't want to risk their end-user business model; if they could create a separate company for the enterprise market, maybe that could work.

> and Linux still doesn't feel like it has the user facing polish it could have

Well, things can be improved, for sure, but I feel it's already on par with Mac OS. And it has been ahead of Windows for some time already...

> then add to the fact that there doesn't seem to be a desktop UI that seems to have a strong continual investment in improving the experience that the lowest common denominator of uses would appreciate

Unity is the classical counter-example here, but I must recognize Gnome serves LCD uses very well, though I'm really more a KDE|Xfce user.

KDE has been shown to unsuspecting users as the new Windows interface and has been praised to no end. As I work with Windows 7, I must cringe everyday about how less friendly it is -- even if compared to Xfce.

Recently, I've been testing KDE Plasma and found it _very_ good looking and polished; for comparison with Windows 10, I didn't try it yet, but from Youtube videos, Deepin looks on par if not better than W10 experience.

> - Linux is a great server OS, but weak on the desktop

Not really. I've been using since many years and it has constantly improved by leaps and bounds. I'm willing to admit it has some distance to cover regarding games, but that doesn't mind at all on the enterprise and I'd say most end-users are not gamers -- they really want to make homework, create pdfs, use spreadsheets, watch Internet videos, watch multimedia created with their smart phones... lots and lots of things which don't really require Windows.

Linux has some really nice offerings on the desktop besides Ubuntu.

> - MacOS is strong on the desktop, but weak on the server

They seem not interested in servers. For the prices they charge, they also seem not interested in desktops; for them, it appears, it's a post-PC world.

> - Windows is average everywhere
> The above also indicates why I believe many companies choose Windows: it may not be the best at anything, but works well enough for must general use cases and allow companies to deal with one vendor and not need a high level of expertise.

A valid point, no doubt. And therein lies the source of our problems: whatever Windows does, someone does that better. It's hard to live with a product perceived as inferior. But most know no other alternative. So Linux and BSD (Mac OS included) are not to blame, in fact...

Another point is that companies really need someone to talk to. Apple has a lot of ground to cover on that regard (and I believe they probably should start a division if they ever want to be relevant here), Linux has some companies which don't care about the desktop (Red Hat), some that care (Canonical) and are slowly becoming relevant and others IMHO who are too small or somewhat undecided (e.g. SuSE).

In my country, if I were a company, I bet I could easily hire someone for in-premises Windows desktop support; not so sure with Canonical. For servers, I bet it would be easy to get contacted by Red Hat, SuSE or Oracle.

For end-users, things are surprisingly easier because: a. nobody gets good Windows support anyway and b. Linux support on the Internet is first-quality.

Re:Surprised?

[AmiMoJo]

I read TFA, the guy is an idiot and screwed up the test.

He configured the router to drop all connections. So Windows tries to access Windows Update, and it fails. So it tries the next server on the list, which fails. Strange, the interface has an IP address, try the next one...

Windows also has this thing called the Out Of Box Experience. It's been there since at least 98, probably before. The first time you log in, it runs a few things so you can choose your preferences and set important stuff up. If you ignore it, it will carry on looking for updates from the Windows Store, updates for live tiles in the start menu etc.

Every OS enables a load of crap by default. This is not surprising at all.

Unlike the guy in TFA, I bothered to do this properly. If you disable everything and don't use Windows Store apps then the only traffic is to Windows Update.

This is what happens when your source is a Reddit knock-off full of people who found Reddit too civil.

Blocking connections probably increases attempts

[enosys]

If you block connections, what would have normally been one successful connection can become many connection attempts. It's also possible that retries for the same thing would use different IP addresses. Someone needs to try an experiment like this without the blocking. A log of the data being transmitted would also be interesting. A lot of that is probably encrypted, but https monitoring via wildcard certificate MITM could capture some in decrypted form.