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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 TheGratefulNet on Friday August 14 2015, @03:03AM

    by TheGratefulNet (659) on Friday August 14 2015, @03:03AM (#222653)

    I hate to ask, but I'm not a windows admin, so maybe others who know that world could give advice.

    is there any trustable blacklist that I could just run and remove the 'harmful' (to us, not to MS) updates?

    when I ran the standard updates gui, there's no clear way to search for the KB string. maybe I missed it. but its sloppy to even have to use a gui. its a 'grep -v' essentially. I want to remove these updates and here's the .txt file of the KB's.

    the real thing I'd wondering is: is there such a list that the community agrees does not really benefit the user and those updates are safe (even beneficial) to remove?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @06:50AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @06:50AM (#222714)

    You missed the search box in the top right! Don't worry, I did too. It should be up there when you go to "Installed Updates" (hidden in the bottom left) in Windows Update.

    I had a bunch of these installed too. Blah.

  • (Score: 2) by MrNemesis on Friday August 14 2015, @08:25AM

    by MrNemesis (1582) on Friday August 14 2015, @08:25AM (#222731)

    is there any trustable blacklist that I could just run and remove the 'harmful' (to us, not to MS) updates?

    Nope.

    Well, for me at least. Have read about some users using Ninite Pro to "curate" the whole process but for the meantime I've made sure my group policies are now only set to pull down "critical only" updates. But what with their behaviour with GWX and W10 I think it's probably only a matter of time before they start pushing this stuff harder and/or start purposefully trying to re-enable disabled functionality. Way to build trustworthiness microsoft.

    Should have seen this coming an age away when MS dispensed with the text telling you WTF the update is going to do; they now all just say "install this update to fix issues in windows" even if you have the "show detailed information" checkbox ticked. You now have to go to their site and read the details on each and every KB every month. Annoying.

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