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.

Comments

Re:It didn't have an off switch before

[LVSlushdat]

Back before I came to the conclusion that Windows 10 should actually be called a CTD (Computer-Transmitted Disease) I took two laptops with 10 Pro on them. One, with the install in an --alledgedly-- castrated state, local acct only, cortana disabled, and a bunch of other gpedit,msc tweaks,and one with a default (MS "recommended") install and then indivdually allowed them to "talk" on my network, which had a remote packet capture daemon running on the router, I used Wireshark to capture/examine the packet captures, and captures that ran for 8 hours each, showed BOTH systems spent the whole time yakking at the same urls... My conclusion is: you're getting fucked either way if you use Windows NSA Edition... Thankfully, I'm now Windows-Free to 100% Linux...