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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.
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.
I would like to augment your point by commenting that Microsoft isn't just *giving* Win10 away, they're *foisting* it as hard as it can, likely breaking quite a few laws in the process.
So that means the profit they're expected to make off of people running Win10 must vastly exceed the cost of making Win10, AND the cost of fighting off all the lawsuits in the process of ramming Win10 onto peoples' computers. One could argue that perhaps they're expecting all that profit to come from people being exposed to the built-in advertisements and the Windows Store, or people so pleased with the OS that they run out and buy a Surface/Xbox/WinPhone, but does anybody really believe that?
Let's even assume these are benign and not conveying any big brother information at all (which I doubt). What are these things doing and why? Don't spin it, explain it.
DNS - Well understood network fundamental (for most of us, anyway)
NetBIOS - Well understood network fundamental (mostly)
NTP - Well understood, totally optional
Spurious HTTP accesses by "probably UWP apps"? That's probably not ok, more info required.
Attempts to access a Microsoft Teredo server (and sometimes failing)? That sounds broken, turn it off.
Various cloud hosts? That's probably not ok, more info required.
That the machine is making unbidden accesses to the network at large without asking me is wrong (and OS X and most Linux distros do some of this too, although in the latter cast it is USUALLY to an update server, which I would approve but should have been asked first).
...What we really need is a hardware firewall that blocks all access to Microsoft domain names and IP addresses.
I recall reading within the past week, (probably in connection with Office 365), that some functionality was simply broken when telemetry was disabled beyond what the OS itself allows users to disable. Perhaps that breakage only applies to Microsoft applications; but if it doesn't already apply to third party programs, and indeed to the OS proper, I'm sure Microsoft will fix that 'oversight' sooner-rather-than-later in a mandatory update.
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.
I think with Windows 10 we're seeing the advent of a brand of distributed computing in which 'error checking' takes place between MS servers and your computer. MS gets to define what an 'error' is; if the data your computer sends back to the mothership isn't what MS is expecting, they will simply discard it. And they may disable part or all of your OS functionality as well. Coming up with an algorithm which can successfully fool Redmond while sending false information might be quite a programming exercise.
...Microsoft might get the message and cut this out.
Not a chance. The only thing that will get Microsoft's attention is customers jumping ship in droves. And we all know that ain't gonna happen. Too many people don't understand where this is all going, and most of the rest simply don't care.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
And what business is of theirs what software I'm running and how often I'm using it?
It is their business when their business depends on it. The common complaints users have with Windows have led them there. The large amount of hardware, software variations coupled with the different user types makes it difficult to have something universal that just works 100% of the time.
My only beef with them is that they won't tell us what they collect and what are the triggers. I'm all for letting them grab data on my usage and the condition of my system. After all, it's in my best interest to help them improve the OS.
MS in has recently shown interest in listening to the community and it's important we keep prying them for that information so that we can eventually feel at ease about what's happening.