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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: 2, Informative) by timbim on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:35PM

    by timbim (907) on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:35PM (#222473)

    Meanwhile on Reddit, if you suggest to MAYBE not use Microsoft you get downvoted to oblivion.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:41PM (#222475)

    "Meanwhile on Reddit, if you suggest to MAYBE not use Microsoft you get downvoted to oblivion."

    What does Reddit have to do with this? Who gives a shit?

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by DECbot on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:53PM

      by DECbot (832) on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:53PM (#222483) Journal

      OP: "Forums concerned about privacy think to block Microsoft instead of considering using a different OS."
      GP: "Try posting a recommendation to use a different OS on Reddit, get modded to Oblivion."
      Parent: "What the fuck does Reddit matter?"

      My take: Microsoft has enough shillbots on Reddit (and other forums) to distort the echo chamber.
      Distortion message: "Why try another OS when you can disable undesired parts of the MS preferred OS?"

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
      • (Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:52PM

        by captain normal (2205) on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:52PM (#222545)

        Agree...if blackhats can hack boot in an Intel bios, whats to keep anyone from finding a way to boot an open OS.

        --
        When life isn't going right, go left.