SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.]
(Score: 2, Informative) by SDRefugee on Thursday August 13 2015, @08:12PM
I'm my neighborhood "tech support" and I've already has several neighbors ask me about Windows 10.. I'd originally told them its pretty nice *if* you turn off all of the "anti-privacy" stuff, but if these allegations are found to be true, I'll be updating my recommendations to HELL FUCKING NO!!!! I sense a large number of machines going to Linux in the next few months, along with a lot of the older systems that are *still* on XP..... Good business opportunity...
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:53PM
Let's hope all the distros don't take this opportunity to screw up their UIs again.
KDE's Plasma 5 is looking pretty damned nice these days though.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:43PM
Well, KDE *is* planning on requiring systemd...though I'm not sure KDE5 does. OTOH, the number of reports of machines being (nearly) bricked (i.e., disk format required) by systemd has dropped to nearly non-existent. So perhaps it's not as bad as I at first thought. I must admit that it hasn't given me any trouble on my Debian system, though I was quite hesitant about it. (And still don't see what was wrong with init.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Friday August 14 2015, @12:12AM
I just hope that there's a KDE 4 fork so that I can keep my lovely transparency long after the rest of the world has decided that it doesn't need depth perception...
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.