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posted by CoolHand on Thursday August 13 2015, @06:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the oh-that-microsoft dept.

Peter Bright at ArsTechnica reports:

Windows 10 uses the Internet a lot to support many of its features. The operating system also sports numerous knobs to twiddle that are supposed to disable most of these features, and the potentially privacy-compromising connections that go with them.

Unfortunately for privacy advocates, these controls don't appear to be sufficient to completely prevent the operating system from going online and communicating with Microsoft's servers.

For example, even with Cortana and searching the Web from the Start menu disabled, opening Start and typing will send a request to www.bing.com to request a file called threshold.appcache which appears to contain some Cortana information, even though Cortana is disabled. The request for this file appears to contain a random machine ID that persists across reboots.

Hairyfeet's contribution adds the following:

A Czech site went one further and did a traffic analysis on a default Windows 10 install, what did he find? Well it looks like the Win 10 Keylogger in the beta is still running with pretty much every keystroke, voice, and webcam data being sent to Microsoft even with Cortana disabled.

[Ed's Comment: The report about the Czech traffic analysis originally came from a newspaper and some comments doubt the veracity of this source.]


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Subsentient on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:22PM

    by Subsentient (1111) on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:22PM (#222464) Homepage Journal

    Don't worry, MS is trying to make it impossible to disable secure boot. Soon you'll only be able to boot a handful of distros that payed MS to sign their bootloaders. Later, I bet they will refuse to sign keys, effectively locking Linux out of 2018 PCs.

    --
    "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:32PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:32PM (#222470)

    If there isn't a law mandating that, then someone has to jump at the opportunity for a decent size niche building computers without the mandatory MS behaviors and holes.
    People would have to pay a bit more, but they might even run BSD-based OSes.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:39PM (#222474)

      Does not mean that 'that someone' is going to make any decent hardware/software, so it could be junk and the situation would be pretty much the same.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:39PM (#222532)

      Don't worry, you'll probably find that it will be mandated in the TPP (or something similar) that all future motherboards will require SecureBoot or UEFI.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Friday August 14 2015, @01:29AM

      by jmorris (4844) on Friday August 14 2015, @01:29AM (#222617)

      That is their goal actually. They, just like Apple btw, see every computer that ships with Windows as 'theirs' and resent Linux 'free riding' on 'their' formerly open PC platform. Just don't be shocked when the small niche players who attempt Linux hardware produce underpowered, buggy hardware that is even farther behind the state of the moment that Apple usually is.

      It won't just be a matter of buying a motherboard and building a beige box, ALL of them will be locked to Microsoft at time of manufacture. You will have to go all the way to China and contract for a product of your own design from the ground up. Anybody already established like ASUS or Gigabyte will be forced to chose between Microsoft and Linux and 100% will choose to make Windows motherboards only. They won't even be allowed to license the design files unless there is a contractual obligation to lock any resulting design to Microsoft. Their future vision of jackbooks stamping on faces is probably in your living room.... XBox. The XBox 360 was never cracked, neither was the PS/3 and odds are the XBox One and PS/4 won't be either. That is the future of the PC they want.

      Servers will of course remain open, if you offer them that binary choice they would choose Linux and Microsoft knows it and therefore won't make the demand.

      And while one or two open motherboards will eventually appear (always for the previous generation CPUs of course) you can pretty much forget PC laptops other than recycling Chromebooks with their yuck keyboards other misfeatures.

      • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday August 14 2015, @02:50AM

        by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday August 14 2015, @02:50AM (#222647) Journal

        Laugh out fucking loud...the X360 was never cracked? Well then I guess all those pirate 360s loaded up with warez I see on every fricking Craigslist is just an illusion huh? And the ONLY devices that have had the UEFI locked were devices that took the powered by Bing version of Windows which the OEMs get for free in RETURN for MSFT getting to set the defaults. its no different than the page and a half of CLI and flaming hoops you have to jump through just to get a Chromebook to run a handful of Linux distros with hacked bootloaders because Google subsidized the hardware, NO difference at all. For everybody that isn't so cheap they are buying $150 Walmart Specials? You can be loading any OS, and unlike a Chromebook I DO mean any OS, from BSD to OS/2 Warp, as fast as the drive will load the install.

        So please step away from the crack pipe sir, its obviously causing damage.

        --
        ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday August 14 2015, @03:16AM

          by jmorris (4844) on Friday August 14 2015, @03:16AM (#222658)

          It is you who are mistaken. The XBox 360 had exactly one exploit, the firmware in the optical drive could be jinked with to avoid the media check which was supposed to detect copied optical media vs pressed originals. An unavoidable issue with distributing pressed media and not requiring online validation of a product key before install/run or direct online sales... something they apparently corrected with XBox One. The signed binaries part was never even partially cracked on the 360 and the only cracks on PS/3 required wires to surface mount components and external equipment FAR beyond the reach of any but the most dedicated. It is why Xbox Media Center became the formless, not an acronym at all, XBMC and finally just renamed to something else entirely. Everyone expected the 360 to be cracked and XBMC to come back in on the Linux port just like the original XBox. Never happened. There were zero homebrew programs for the XBox 360 or PS/3 although the Wii was pretty well cracked and attracted a hobby scene.

          And it is far more than just the subsidized hardware getting the locks. All tablets, 100% instead of only the ARM based ones, preloaded with Windows 10 are locked down. I haven't checked in detail but as far as I saw zero of the previous generation ARM based tablets were cracked. Odds are zero of these Intel based units will be either. Even the generic sludge crawling out of China unbadged doesn't seem to be getting cracked. They are serious. They won't stop. When all hardware that can run Windows ships with it preloaded, piracy is no longer an issue. And yes they will go there too. When they don't have to worry about pesky hackers they don't have to worry about how odious their ad infested, spyware of an OS becomes because users can no longer either patch it to mitigate the worst bits or escape entirely to Linux.

          Meanwhile, still haven't heard of a Chromebook without a developer switch which opens up a lot of options and the bootloaders are more often a case of poor documentation and blobs getting in the way but Google now has a documented and fully open bootloader they are offering so that situation should improve over time. Google IS evil, just less evil than Microsoft.

          • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday August 14 2015, @09:29AM

            by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday August 14 2015, @09:29AM (#222758) Journal

            Insightful? Really mods? I guess nobody who modded this up has ever heard of eBay [ebay.com]. Its called a modchip boys, it works just fine, has for ages. Where do you think ALL THOSE HACKED X360s came from? I mean do you all seriously believe that all those X360s happen to be the one rev that had a certain optic drive? Really?

            To steal a line from one of my favorite movies "Think McFly, Think!"

            --
            ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
            • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @01:41PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @01:41PM (#222813)

              Your link shows modchips for the controller, and not the console.

              While impressive, and informative what they can accomplish with a controller, it is not a hacked console.

        • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday August 14 2015, @05:08PM

          by tangomargarine (667) on Friday August 14 2015, @05:08PM (#222907)

          And the ONLY devices that have had the UEFI locked were devices that took the powered by Bing version of Windows which the OEMs get for free in RETURN for MSFT getting to set the defaults.

          Yet.

          --
          "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday August 14 2015, @05:25PM

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Friday August 14 2015, @05:25PM (#222910) Journal

      At this point, we either embrace small ARM systems based on mali graphics to ensure nearly complete openness.

      Someone could start a kickstarter for an open source motherboard running coreboot. There is a coreboot router board based on the AMD SoC, the ALIX board by PC Engines. Though, it's only a 1GHz dual core SoC.