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You Can't Turn Off Cortana In the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (pcworld.com)
Microsoft will release Windows 10 Anniversary Update next week. Earlier this week we listed some of its best features. PCWorld is now reporting about a major change that may annoy some users: once you've installed the update, Cortana can no longer be disabled. From the article: Cortana, the personal digital assistant that replaced Windows 10's search function and taps into Bing's servers to answer your queries with contextual awareness, no longer has an off switch. The impact on you at home: Similar to how Microsoft blocked Google compatibility with Cortana, the company is now cutting off the plain vanilla search option. That actually makes a certain of amount of sense. Unless you turned off all the various cloud-connected bits of Windows 10, there's not a ton of difference between Cortana and the operating system's basic search capabilities.
Courtesy Martin Brinkmann
http://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/26/you-will-use-cortana-says-microsoft/
or install Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB, which got none of this nonsense.
Easier said than done, Microsoft doesn't sell Windows Enterprise off the shelf. You have to negotiate a licensing plan with them.
In some ways this is more honest, it's been demonstrated that the OS will talk to 107 domains whether or not some switches are toggled in the Control Panel to give the illusion of privacy.
Any list of those so I can set them to 127.0.0.1 in my Hosts file?
Here you go: https://github.com/WindowsLies...
However it won't work because Windows bypasses its own hosts file for its own purposes. You'll have to block it from your router or other external firewall.
Any list of those so I can set them to 127.0.0.1 in my Hosts file?
That won't help you any, the IP addresses are hard-coded into the OS via dnsapi.dll, which Windows 10 will consult prior to the rest of the resolver stack (hosts, WINS, name servers, etc). You're going to need another machine between you and your internet connection, one with a proper implementation like iptables/ipfw/nftables/etc to drop traffic destined for those IPs.
Of course, the IPs of the telemetry servers are subject to change at Microsoft's whim, so you're going to end up stuck playing whack-a-mole. Me, I'm just not going to install Windows 10.
"If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
I agree. We bought a little Acer E3-111 for my wife with Windows 8.1 awhile back. It worked just fine. We had some problems with the touchpad recently and I figured, why not upgrade to Windows 10. We've both regretted that decision. It run slowly, and every few days there's new reasons on Slashdot and elsewhere not to run Windows 10. A few days ago I booted Linux Mint 18, Mate edition from a USB stick. Firefox (my wife's preffered browser) started so quickly we were startled and everything was very smooth. I looked at the hits on my firewall/proxy server from her IP and they were down to almost nothing. I'll be upgrading her to Linux this weekend.
If you don't like Cortana, you can make it go away and never use it.
From TFA: Microsoft told PCWorld. "If you like, you can also easily hide Cortana and the search box in the taskbar altogether."
Cortana is simply a browser searchbar that uses Bing, re-located to the taskbar, and can talk.
1. change default browser from Edge to anything else... except IE. Be sure your new Browser does not use Bing as its search engine.
2. Right-click on the Taskbar, choose to Hide Cortana.
3. (optional) Install ClassicShell, Start8, or equivalent to provide a convenient basic search functionality.
4. (optional) Still paranoid? Try Spybot Anti-Beacon.
5. Proceed as before. Run Steam or something.
Unfortunately, you don't understand the difference between disabling Cortana and merely hiding it so you can't see it. And Microsoft is counting on that level of ignorance.
After following those steps you listed, bring up Task manager and you will see that Cortana is still running. Kill the process and it immediately comes back. I did finally manage to successfully kill Cortana, but it's tricky and I experienced system instability afterward. So I just to Microsoft to fuck off and went back Windows 7.
Yep. You can disable it in the group policy editor if you have pro, or in the registry editor if you don't.
As admin, run this command in one line:
reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search" /t REG_DWORD /v "AllowCortana" /d 0 /f
There, no more cortana.