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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @02:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @02:16AM (#222635)

    I hope you know that there are some "special" protocols wireshark will not pick up.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @08:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @08:43AM (#222736)

    Such as IP over Avian Carriers?

    Oh, sure if you run Wireshark on the Windows machine, you'll only get to see the traffic that Windows actually presents, but anyone who calls himself an admin knows that if you are looking for malicious traffic (same rules as for root kits), you run Wireshark on the router, not on the machine you suspect of being infected.

    • (Score: 1) by SDRefugee on Friday August 14 2015, @12:12PM

      by SDRefugee (4477) on Friday August 14 2015, @12:12PM (#222788)

      Some of us don't just call ourselves admins, we *are* admins, which is why we have rpcapd running on our routers... :)

      --
      America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..