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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @12:46AM
I kept hearing this very same line presented about Internet Explorer, right up to - and after - the revelation that IE only dominated the market because businesses kept using it.
Mind you, one of the numb-nuts who told me that also "proved" (in his own mind) that Firefox was just a front end for Internet Explorer. Same guy, a shop owner, has also told me that an aftermarket Cooler Master heatsink will modify a ZIF socket for an i7, causing the graphics subsystem to short out.
(Score: 1) by Stardaemon on Friday August 14 2015, @07:53AM
Same guy, a shop owner, has also told me that an aftermarket Cooler Master heatsink will modify a ZIF socket for an i7, causing the graphics subsystem to short out.
To be fair, he might have been speaking from experience;)