Slashdot Mirror
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.
Except that a massive amount of these "connections" were fucking NTP and DNS. Alarmist at best. But hey, hating on MS is the hip cool thing to do, considering it's 1997. No wait it's 2016 and the linux desktop still hasn't "won" Neither did Novel, neither did apple. Who remains the king of the desktop OS for better or for worse? MS. Who are the people claiming to be leaving windows forever? People who never fucking ran it in the first place. You have full and total control over what goes out over your network, if you fail to pay attention, it's your fault. That said, I don't dig the tracking, but it's not nearly as bad as some of you seem to think it is. So lets recap, asshatA records all the connections coming from his PC and immediately exclaims "MICOCRAP IS TRAKKING UZZZZ" but fails to omit the NTP, DNS and gods knows whatever, normal, traffic from this report.