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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.
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.
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!"
This is supposed to be comforting?
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.
You can't even listen to music on OS X or iPhone without the software contacting Apple.
I'm quite tired of this nonsense rebuttal. When you use an Apple application, it contacts Apple's servers to see if there are updates available--you can turn that off as well. In contrast, when do you even the most mundane things in Win10 (with the telemetry turned off, mind you), the OS contacts over 100 different domains: https://github.com/WindowsLies...
Why the fuck does Win10 contact telemetry.appex.bing.net, ad.doubleclick.net, and watson.live.com whenever you open the fucking Notepad?
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.
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.
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.
a) timothy is not a new editor.
b) this article is talking about how garbage the results are.
c) old users still the same bitchy unappeasable old users.