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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.

6 of 264 comments (clear)

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

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

  2. Re:No worse than iPhone by LichtSpektren · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  3. Re:Not only am I bothred by the phone-home, by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And what business is of theirs what software I'm running and how often I'm using it? It's not their computer. Also, the article writer attempted to minimize the consequences by saying that you can greatly limit the amount of requests in Windows Enterprise. The majority of users are not using the Enterprise edition.

    What an obvious apologist/shill.

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  4. poison the data by frovingslosh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  5. 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.

  6. Re:What kind of telemetry by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually allow me to correct your correction as MSFT is giving away absolutely nothing as a full version (not the "super duper extra spyware" insider edition) of Windows 10 Requires a legal key from 7 or 8 which currently costs as of this writing between $100-$200 dollars and there are several reports of users trying to go back to Windows 7 after the 30 days to find THEIR KEYS ARE NOW INVALIDATED. I can attest to this being true as I've had to talk to more damned third world MSFT flunkies than I ever cared to thanks to this very issue.

    So the REAL cost of Windows 10 is currently between $100- $200 USD, that is the cost of the Windows 7 or 8 key you are giving up by taking this "free OS" and not going for the super duper extra spyware insider edition......sorry but that is the most fucking expensive "free OS" I've ever seen in my life and why we need to kill that "Oh its free you can't complain" bullshit because that is what it is, total bullshit!

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