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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) by Hairyfeet on Thursday August 13 2015, @10:08PM

    by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Thursday August 13 2015, @10:08PM (#222552) Journal

    Well it was on Github, surprise surprise it fell down and went boom. I uploaded it to Dropbox [dropbox.com] so hopefully that will work better.

    BTW allow me to LMAO at how bad the groupthink is, wanna bet if I would have left out the fact that Linux shit smells as bad as Windows shit that I would have gotten a +5 insightful? ROFL, the hairyfeet challenge has stood for 8 years yet they are just as delusional as ever, when in doubt "stay the course" FOSSies! LOL.

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  • (Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:08PM

    by captain normal (2205) on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:08PM (#222568)

    I get a 404 on that one. Maybe MS is after you. :-)) Or maybe it's just that I'm on a mobile connection and/or my anti-spyware and cookie blockers are blocking it. I'll give it a try when I get on a faster pipe in a couple of hours. Have to agree with you about Linux gang. They're almost as bad as the Apple fanboies. I have nothing against either OS, but they are not as easy to use as either would have you believe. Nor as secure, at least with Apple, I know people that pay no attention to security because "Apple doesn't get malware".

    --
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    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday August 14 2015, @03:12AM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 14 2015, @03:12AM (#222656) Homepage Journal

      I get a 404 too, on my home wifi.

      • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday August 14 2015, @09:24AM

        by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday August 14 2015, @09:24AM (#222755) Journal

        Sigh, know any place better than Dropbox that I can drop the file? If anybody wants it they can always shoot me an email and I'll send them the file in a .zippy (just remove the last 2 letters) but I've got the file setting here if anybody knows a better place than dropbox or if somebody wants me to email it to them and then they host it on their own servers I'm game, it was GPL software IIRC.

        --
        ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @08:49PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @08:49PM (#222999)

          It's 2015.

          You're asking people to send you a message so you can pkzip.exe an executable, rename and email it so they can rename it again, pkunzip.exe it, and then run some binary that someone on the internet sent them. This executable file you have that can't be found anywhere else on the internet is sure to fix their windows woes.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @04:16AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @04:16AM (#222676)

      Free Software is not about convenience or quality, but about freedom. And as Microsoft and others have proven time and time again (in this case as well), freedom is an important cause.