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ZDNet Writer Downplays Windows 10's Phoning-Home Habits

Posted by timothy on from the you-always-call-you-always-write dept.

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.

2 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. What about by NotInHere · · Score: 5, Informative

    Adding [forbes.com] to forbes links on the front page?

  2. Re:Not only am I bothred by the phone-home, by F.Ultra · · Score: 5, Informative

    True that Ubuntu did it by default before (they have since disabled it) but you could easily disable it via the GUI settings. I disabled it and unless I actively do something with the network like surf the web with Firefox or stream music then a "sudo tcpdump -nvpi eth0" on my Ubuntu shows absolutely no connection attemps from my machine what so ever, all that I see is some other machine on the network sending broadcast ARP requests for the MAC of the defautl gateway.

    f.ultra@ubuntu:~$ sudo tcpdump -nvpi eth0
    tcpdump: listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 262144 bytes
    19:49:51.946496 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:49:53.996275 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:49:56.054219 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:49:58.136104 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:50:00.221756 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:50:02.276667 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:50:04.353056 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:50:06.431986 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:50:08.520302 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:50:10.584220 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:50:12.625328 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:50:14.712258 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:50:16.782389 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46
    19:50:18.856272 ARP, Ethernet (len 6), IPv4 (len 4), Request who-has 192.168.0.1 tell 192.168.0.249, length 46

    And it goes on and on like that for hours, so no most Linux distros does not do some of this too.