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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.
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.
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?
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.
Your system encrypts it with Microsoft's public key before it is send out. Microsoft accepts the information and decrypts it with their private key.
If you could know what the OS was doing with the info before it is encrypted, you could find out what's being sent out; but (to my knowledge) that's impossible to know.
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.
Actually, yes I can.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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?
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.
It looks more like thousands of examples of DNS, NTP, NetBIOS and other perfectly normal and required traffic for any system that is connected to a network or the internet. I mean nearly all of these examples are basic network functionality. Most of the rest are things like OS updates, application updates, applications downloading scheduled data (weather, news, etc.). I know this is /. and we are all supposed to hate MS and Winblow$ like it's still 1999, but can we at least TRY to apply some logic and reasoning to our hating?
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.
I agree but the people who downloaded and installed windows 10 agreed to something very different. Linux Free and Microsoft Free are 2 very different things. Personally i don't feel bad for any person who choose to install win 10 they can/could have always uninstall it. IMO the only people who have a complaint are the business/persons who bought licances/ deals they paid for win 10. They should have the say on everything the OS collects and data mines. BTW do you know what Linux any distro collects?
Jack of all trades,master of none
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.
FYI, in a corporate environment, if you are running Windows 10 Enterprise, you have more control (via GP) to disable telemetry.
In anything other than Enterprise, setting the telemetry to "0 - don't send telemetry" is equivalent to setting it to "1 - Send limited telemetry".
But even still, in a corporate environment, there are other ways to block this kind of thing. I am thinking ACL's on the firewall or layer 7 (application) rules in the firewall. But you could also maintain internal DNS that loops back certain MS domains.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with a DNS service at some point that does this.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
NetBIOS over TCP is still a core part of Microsoft networking and the broadcasts allow the various machines running Windows or SAMBA to discover each other without needing a central directory server. It is still implemented because it is a useful API with decent backward compatibility with everything back to 95/98.
This isn't the old NetBIOS Frames line protocol from the extremely old days, rather the service layer protocol that handles the discovery, negotiation and authentication parts of peer-to-peer file and printer sharing in Windows.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Well, son, there are three possible scenarios:
- They are using a symmetric key (doubtful)
- They are using assymmetric keys to negotiate a symmetric key on the fly
- They are using asymmetric keys for the whole transmission
The first two can be figured out with some kernel patching, or even just firing up a VM and watching for the symmetric key.
The third would involve patching the kernel to replace Microsoft's public key used for encryption with your own public key that you can then decrypt with a private key. Or just flat out disable the encryption entirely.
Either way it's done, you'd also need to have another host emulate Microsoft's server responses to see how the exchange takes place, and simply capture what is being sent, and analyze.
I don't use Windows on my computers (I do have a Windows phone) so I don't have a dog in this fight but... Err... You know what telemetry is, right? I mean, you can (and should) be able to turn it off if you want and off should mean off - no questions asked. But, umm... If they don't know how you use the OS then they won't be *likely* to consider your use-case when they make changes. They won't know that you're one of the people with that video card and having that problem so they won't fix it if you don't send crash reports. They won't be able to optimize their personal assistant thing if you don't let them have that personal data.
Now, to be clear, I'm a firm believer in off means off. But, it's incumbent on you to know what the outcome of your choices may be. Oh, they might get enough reports about that driver and video problem but what if your peers also shut it off? This goes in both directions, actions have consequences. I don't know what the outcome will be but I'm pretty sure they're actually pretty good at collecting (and by lack of reports to the contrary) securing this telemetry data. Where I using Windows, I'd probably let them have the data - though I'd be pretty pissed if off didn't mean off. (I'm kinda big on that - off is off and on is on, it's an honesty thing.)
One other thing to note... Since the days of 95, but more pronounced with 98, there tends to be a big swing in the direction of people who are moving to Linux. Six months or so later, they're gone from the forums and the .ISO download numbers are back to normal. In a year, they've turned into rabid supporters of the OS they were so against. I have been watching and expecting a huge swing in numbers. (I seed well over 100 distros - the last time I counted there were 144, it's not an exact metric so I also look at the sites that offer their stats like DistroWatch.)
You know what I've seen? Not a whole hell of a big jump in numbers. Lots of noise. I see a lot of that. But the numbers don't seem to indicate any huge swings, perhaps fewer now than when 8 and 8.1 dropped. I'd not be surprised if someone could get and crunch the numbers and they turned out that this uptake isn't all that high with Linux right now. So, people don't actually seem to be pissed off about this at the level where they're jumping ship.
I dunno... Were I still using Windows, this might have been enough to make me bail. It's not that I dislike the telemetry. It's that I want off when I say off. If I can't trust my OS to do that, what can I trust it for?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."