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ZDNet Writer Downplays Windows 10's Phoning-Home Habits
jones_supa writes: Gordon F. Kelly of Forbes whipped up a frenzy over Windows 10 when a Voat user found out in a little experiment that the operating system phones home thousands of times a day. ZDNet's Ed Bott has written a follow-up where he points out how the experiment should not be taken too dramatically. 602 connection attempts were to 192.168.1.255 using UDP port 137, which means local NetBIOS broadcasts. Another 630 were DNS requests. Next up was 1,619 dropped connection attempts to address 94.245.121.253, which is a Microsoft Teredo server. The list goes on with NTP, random HTTP requests, and various cloud hosts which probably are reached by UWP apps. He summarizes by saying that a lot of connections are not at all about telemetry. However, what kind of telemetry and data-mined information Windows specifically sends still remains largely a mystery; hopefully curious people will do analysis on the operating system and network traffic sent by it.
See? Microsoft knows that ONLY apps can app apps, which is why these apps are apping other apps while apping apps!
Apps!
Adding [forbes.com] to forbes links on the front page?
I am bothered by the explicit policy of tracking everything I do within my OS. That is the real issue. That is why I am leaving Windows forever.
"Here are thousands of examples of Windows transmitting network traffic unbidden"
Sure, traffic is probably encrypted, but since your system is encrypting it, surely there's a way to discover the keys and find out exactly what data is being sent.
I personally don't have either the time nor the kernel hacking skills to pull it off, but I'm sure somebody could.
Apparently it's some apologism for Windows 10, but an unbelievably poor one. "Oh no, no no! Please don't panic because Windows phones home to over 100 different servers even when you turn the telemetry off. It's probably, eh... nobody's quite sure, but I'm sure everything will be okay!"
Microsoft Apologist Desperately Rationalizes Windows 10's Phoning-Home Habits
This is supposed to be comforting?
You can't even listen to music on OS X or iPhone without the software contacting Apple.
They gave away at least a few billion dollars' worth of revenue when they gave away Windows 10 for free. So the kind of telemetry they are collecting is at least worth a few billion dollars. Anyone who says different is lying. There is no free lunch.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"These aren't the droids you're looking for"
Yes, they probably are
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
have always stood against the people. Stood against the people.
They think corporations are people and have more rights than us. More rights than us.
Well, since the article is a reaction to "Windows is sending your more personal information back to MS *thousands* of times per day," I'd say yes. It's not so much about comfort as a realistic approach to evaluating what is sent.
My computer phones home to Google thousands of times a day, too. Of course, it's getting my mail, my calendar, and other data, along with the telemetry it's collecting. But, you know, I should be absolutely petrified that Google is spying on me with all that data going back and forth. I suppose.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Some of use don't have the luxury of not using Windows, either because we need to run applications that are only on Windows or we work with or support others who cannot be forced off Windows. What we really need is a hardware firewall that blocks all access to Microsoft domain names and IP addresses. Or even better one that sends bad data to Microsoft. Maybe a nice little distributed computing project would be to know what data Microsoft is collecting and the write and distribute software that keeps feeding Microsoft bogus data to make their data collection less useful. If enough people ran such software, and I believe a lot of people would gladly do it no matter if the were Windows or Linux users, Microsoft might get the message and cut this out.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Anyone spot the flaw(s) in the argument in this bit of the linked article ?
Mr. Crust's list has another 549 connection attempts on port 80, which is plain old HTTP. Windows doesn't have a web server installed by default, so those are all incoming connections, with Windows trying to retrieve data from Microsoft's servers. They're not sending it the other direction.
the writer obviously didn't..
Once every day or so: "here are the Microsoft packages installed, are there any updates ?" That does not include: non Microsoft packages, hardware info (other than needed to choose packages), disk/net/cpu/... usage, local account/user info, package usage/popularity, lists of: file names, web sites visited, ...
If it's suspicious activity that wasn't disclosed ahead of time, it should be considered nefarious until proven otherwise. Your machine is not under your control ... that's a serious problem.
Even a Linux machine hardly is under "full control" of yours. Try sometimes monitoring the network traffic and you will find that even Linux establishes spurious connections all the time. What was that connection to "star3-44-nyc-plaza.canonical.com" or "a98d-fedora-customer.t-data.akamaitechnologies.com"...
Hopefully, curious people spend their working on and improving the alternatives, instead.
The article claiming Windows 10 telemetry phoned home a ridiculous amount of times even when disabled was false. The user who conducted the experiment set telemetry to basic rather than turning it off. Furthermore, some of the apps that might make connections, what's known as the Windows out of the box experience, were not disabled. Furthermore, the router was configured to drop all outbound connections. As a result, the failed attempts to connect resulted in retrying or connecting to different mirrors over and over again. For some services like Windows Update this is completely reasonable behavior, otherwise they'd be vulnerable to a denial of service attack against the update server. The methodology exaggerated the amount of connections made by Windows while not even properly disabling telemetry. These are the facts. One reputable Slashdot user noted that when telemetry was disabled fully in the Enterprise version of Windows and all of the other apps were disabled, the only outbound connections were, in fact, Windows Update.
Despite the facts, Slashdot users complain about any story that suggests that Windows 10 telemetry isn't as severe as it's made out to be and accuse the authors of being Microsoft shills. Furthermore, these Slashdot users get modded up, and the parent is at +4 insightful. It seems that facts are optional in these discussions, and that's a shame. Those who make such false claims about Linux distros such as Ubuntu are rightly accused of being trolls and modded accordingly. But doing that to Microsoft is insightful.
Those of you who post such things and mod up such posts should be ashamed of yourselves. If privacy advocates want to be taken seriously, the discussions need to be based on facts instead of FUD. There are real issues with Windows telemetry namely that users are automatically opted in without being prompted, that Microsoft hasn't disclosed what data are sent to them, and that only the Enterprise versions of Windows 10 can fully disable the telemetry. These are real issues. But when there's so much FUD and misinformation, it damages the credibility of those who raise very legitimate objections. You should be ashamed of yourself for posting false information because it does a disservice to those with very real concerns about privacy.
Just the fact that it it phoning home is enough to reveal some information, such as that the device on the other end is running Windows 10. Looks like it's also trying to discover any other machines on the local network.
Oh, the humanity!
If it's suspicious activity that wasn't disclosed ahead of time, it should be considered nefarious until proven otherwise. Your machine is not under your control ... that's a serious problem.
I'll assume you never use a smartphone, a user friendly Linux distribution (or *BSD ditto) etc.? Even browsing the web would make the machine "not under your control" so I guess you use telnet to communicate with /. servers.
Either that or your post is essentially useless.
They're one of the harder corporate shills. Microsoft or Apple, they know no bounds in selling out.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"Looks like it's also trying to discover any other machines on the local network"
Yeah, that's called network discovery. It's something windows has done since like...forever ago. My Linux boxes do the same thing. I don't hear you screaming about that.
The author of that article makes some valid points for about 55% of the "traffic"; he does not however make much of a convincing case at all as too why most of the the other 2100 should be happening in an 8 or 30 hour period.
Sensational or not, Mr. Kelly's whipping has actually provoked at least on the surface a positive result\response out of Microsoft, they claim that 'later this year' they will be providing a way to disable all telemetry\data collection, this time for realzies they claim, even though they are apparently really really going to recommend users to not actually disable the stuff. I'll believe this when I see it, but at least there may be some hope.
Where I work, and at most of the companies I have worked for, the vast majority of the software used, ran on Windows.
Whether it was servers or workstations, Windows was the choice. This was because the software used could only be ran on Windows. I suspect there are many companies/government agencies/schools, etc that are in that same situation. Sure, there may be a *nix server here, an Apple product there, etc, but Microsoft definitely has the stranglehold.
Since Microsoft is in this position, and the software used by my workplace runs only on Windows, there will eventually come a time, when vendors have put out versions of their software that will run on WX, that all workstations in our workplace will be WX. I don't see this NOT happening.
This means, that unless someone took the time to configure a firewall to block all of the telemetry, etc, connections going out to Microsoft's "user data and profiling aggregation infrastructure", anything someone did on one of those WX machines, while at work, would essentially be tracked and logged by Microsoft and whoever they were sharing that data with.
I don't think people really understand what this means.
Oh, and do me a favor. Please don't suggest I use Linux. If a workplace like mine, or the others I've been at, could have used Linux instead of Windows, that transition would have happened years ago.
And another thing, there is a false sense of privacy among many about BYOD. As if using your iPhone or Samsung is going to leave you a trail free of crumbs. Free from every comment you make online, free of every post or update.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Even after the moronic voat user was shown to have completely screwed up the entire test slashdot is here referencing it yet again as fact? The new editors - just as shitty as the old ones.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Anal rape is only half as bad as you thought.
Also, Windows 10 is only half as bad as you thought.
Just relax and take it in. Bite the pillow, if you must.
Watch XP. You'll see the exact same traffic.
You all just make yourselves look like idiots by pretending all of this traffic is about spying on you.
DNS queries aren't "spying."
Yes, actually they can be. I don't want Microsoft to know that I read deepdotweb anymore than I want the government to know that. Why is microsoft resolving names for Windows 10 users? And who are they sharing the logs with?
This Windows 10 apologist has nothing to offer as an acceptable excuse for this behavior.
has been a long-time Microsoft apologist, so this isn't entirely unexpected.
It feels like there is a renewed effort at the moment by Microsoft to push people to switch to Windows 10. There's been a lot of this propaganda in the press the past week, as well as some big budget games giving windows copies away free... as long as you have Windows 10.
In my view, ANY amount of privacy invasion is too much. Downplay it all you want, but Windows 10 connects, or sends information to Microsoft in ANY WAY and cannot be turned off, then it's too much for me. I'm an average user, and I'm specifically not switching until there's no other choice available to me because of the antics they have pulled.
The very last paragraph of Microsoft's technet article states:
Retention
Microsoft believes in and practices information minimization, so we only gather the info we need, and we only store it for as long as it’s needed to provide a service or for analysis. Much of the info about how Windows and apps are functioning is deleted within 30 days. Other info may be retained longer, particularly if there is a regulatory requirement to do so. Info is typically gathered at a fractional sampling rate, which for some client services, can be as low as 1%.
Can someone explain what "telemetry" would fall under govt' regulation?
My computer phones home to Google thousands of times a day, too.
Funny thing is if you take an Android phone to China it'll self drain it's battery in attempts to phone home to Google. That's kind of the default action when you can see a network but didn't manage to get through to a server. Retry.
Thousands of connection attempts may drop down to a handful if the connections actually went through.
But then there's another question of does windows bulk store telemetry information, does it attempt to send it out blind, or did the user by dropping connections to Microsoft IPs stop windows from even attempting collect telemetry in the first place.
There was nothing right about this test.
Windows specifically sends still remains largely a mystery; hopefully curious people will do analysis on the operating system and network traffic sent by it.
Especially your business.
I'm free to run a *nix box without ever connecting it to the internet. How long before Windows 10 times out and refuses to work unless it's re-validated (may be in a future update, may already exist ... but we know it's coming).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Those are connections *I* choose to initiate. That you don't see the difference is a bit scary.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
When something phones home, and doesn't tell you what data it sends, why would you assume that it's not forwarding that info as well?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Not a problem, just patch out the ASLR support in the kernel itself during startup. (Along with any checks to make sure it's working.) After all, you can't randomize the layout without having a way to tie it all back together. So the initial randomizer can't itself be truly* randomized.
*Note: They can partially randomize it, by making the randomization static, and then reloading the randomizer using the static randomizer to actually randomize the layout of the randomizer. (Whew...) For bonus points randomize the static layout for the initial randomizer during installation or even after so many successful startups. (Which makes it harder to decipher as it's different for each installation. So groups would need to use a VM and the same VM harddisk image to work together in it's deciphering.)
The DoD says DoD puters have to have EE and set telemetry to its lowest setting (EE only), so I am comfortable with it.
iase.disa.mil and search under operating systems.
Personally, I'm going to avoid win 10 until I can't, then run ReactOS. And anything that doesn't work in ReactOS will get a bug report and a simple example program. A simple main.c showing the problem gets good results, I have found.
If you have two apps which are exactly the same to start with and only one does analytics, it would crush the competitor in a year or two after all significant crashes are fixed and user interaction is optimized by studying flow between screens. People grumble about tracking but do not reflect that in their purchasing/web browsing decisions to the extent of choosing an inferior but more anonymous product.
Big difference there. You keep your data on Google. But Microsoft provided an OS. besides updates, you need not having anything more to do with them. Now add the logging and privacy intrusions. Has the lightblub gone off in your head yet?
Cortana: Clippy with boobs and a fetish for going through your drawers when your back is turned.
we're only finger-fucking her.
And that makes it OK.
APK- Please tell me what med you started taking.
Or is it that reading how "APK's days are numbered" concentrated your trollish mind?
Fuck you, either way.
Funny. My computer doesn't phone home to Google thousands of times a day. My tablet only infrequently phones home to Google when I use it. The former, I have a choice in a meaningful way. The latter is crap and having to root my tablet and have a firewall is an absurd provision to block the vast majority of Google's phoning home in Android. Having said that, once rooted I am reasonably confident I can actually block Google's actions; there aren't 101 other unlisted, secret components* off violating my privacy.
Overall, it's a bit apples and oranges a comparison, anyways.
* Sadly, too much bundling has a similar effect, though, with it being hard to give access to the few parts of one component that I want to have access to the internet and to have the rest firewalled. So, it's far from perfect and if you want to raise a complaint about THAT, I'd fully support you. In any case, I don't treat my tablet the same as my computer; the former is a toy and the latter is for serious work. So, that sways my view of things from "petrified" to merely significantly annoyed.
If the telemetry MS uses is so damn evil and worthy of as much despise as posted on /. then why don't you lazy fucks build yourself what you consider to be a malfeasant application, publish it and use the data it collects from Windows 10 users to prove your point. All the MS IS EVIL whining around here is seldom backed up by anything more than an AC sharing their intuitions. Go hold your witch hunts and Ouija board inquiries somewhere else, please and thank you.
The test results don't make sense, anyway. Wouldn't it be better to collect information into a log and then send that log once a day with a scheduler?
Who needs to worry about thousands of connections when only one is needed?
What is wrong with this journalist? He is making the unspoken assumption that more connections means more tracking. One connection per week, uploading an insanely-detailed log, is enough.
The original point of highlighting the number is that tracking is out of control: they have become Google-like or worse, assuming their cloud will always be there, and when they put software out into the world they're free to rely on it whenever they like, so that user tracking is a presumed habit not a nefarious goal and they are culturally incapable of offering a meaningful "off" button.
They are a bunch of fucking crooks, and time and time again they write articles to support business decisions that screw over the little guy.
I can't fucking wait to the day Ziff Davis goes out of business.
You live in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere on a shitty DSL connection that is maybe capped at 6 mbs and you have more than 1 computer in your house running Windows 10 ... or maybe you are a small business in the middle of nowhere with 15 PCs running Windows 10 all sharing a single 10 Mbs connection. Yeah, it's not a problem right?
Fuck off.
> So if I buy a TV made by, say, Samsung or Philips, that gives them carte blanche to record and store everything I say or do in my living room?
Actually, yes, it does. Read the terms of service and EULA when you buy one. Samsung and Vizio seem to be the most aggressive about it, but any modern TV that can (and, usually, must for activation) be connected to the Internet, and has a camera and mic (most costing more than a few hundred$$ do), should be assumed to be monitoring and recording (and uploading frequently to the mothership) at all times. Unless you figure out what IP's it's using and block them at the router, of course, and if you do that eventually the TV may stop working because it can't phone home.
Modern TVs and similar stuff are a big problem not only because of the monitoring, but also because they routinely have p***-poor security and can be hacked in a heartbeat. Modern Windows, at least, usually is fairly secure (at least from a hacking standpoint) once properly set up.
I woke up one morning to find my Windows 7 Laptop was attempting to run Windows 10 for the first time but crashed because my laptop wasn't compatible with Windows 10. If this installation were successful and I was upgraded without consent, how am I agreeing to their EULA? Before you could simply abort the installation and refuse to install the product if you didn't agree with the EULA. In my upgrade to Windows 10, I was never given the option to accept or decline the EULA license that came with Windows 10. I just woke up in the morning and realized while I was asleep my laptop was upgraded to Windows 10 but that the upgrade failed because my laptop wasn't compatible with Windows 10. I ended up having to wipe the entire hard drive and reinstall Windows 7 and recovered some of my previous files from backups I made. After this incident, I have chosen not to use Windows at all but still will have to use it for some tasks but the rest of my computers run Linux and I've been happy with Linux.