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: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday August 14 2015, @03:16AM
It is you who are mistaken. The XBox 360 had exactly one exploit, the firmware in the optical drive could be jinked with to avoid the media check which was supposed to detect copied optical media vs pressed originals. An unavoidable issue with distributing pressed media and not requiring online validation of a product key before install/run or direct online sales... something they apparently corrected with XBox One. The signed binaries part was never even partially cracked on the 360 and the only cracks on PS/3 required wires to surface mount components and external equipment FAR beyond the reach of any but the most dedicated. It is why Xbox Media Center became the formless, not an acronym at all, XBMC and finally just renamed to something else entirely. Everyone expected the 360 to be cracked and XBMC to come back in on the Linux port just like the original XBox. Never happened. There were zero homebrew programs for the XBox 360 or PS/3 although the Wii was pretty well cracked and attracted a hobby scene.
And it is far more than just the subsidized hardware getting the locks. All tablets, 100% instead of only the ARM based ones, preloaded with Windows 10 are locked down. I haven't checked in detail but as far as I saw zero of the previous generation ARM based tablets were cracked. Odds are zero of these Intel based units will be either. Even the generic sludge crawling out of China unbadged doesn't seem to be getting cracked. They are serious. They won't stop. When all hardware that can run Windows ships with it preloaded, piracy is no longer an issue. And yes they will go there too. When they don't have to worry about pesky hackers they don't have to worry about how odious their ad infested, spyware of an OS becomes because users can no longer either patch it to mitigate the worst bits or escape entirely to Linux.
Meanwhile, still haven't heard of a Chromebook without a developer switch which opens up a lot of options and the bootloaders are more often a case of poor documentation and blobs getting in the way but Google now has a documented and fully open bootloader they are offering so that situation should improve over time. Google IS evil, just less evil than Microsoft.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday August 14 2015, @09:29AM
Insightful? Really mods? I guess nobody who modded this up has ever heard of eBay [ebay.com]. Its called a modchip boys, it works just fine, has for ages. Where do you think ALL THOSE HACKED X360s came from? I mean do you all seriously believe that all those X360s happen to be the one rev that had a certain optic drive? Really?
To steal a line from one of my favorite movies "Think McFly, Think!"
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @01:41PM
Your link shows modchips for the controller, and not the console.
While impressive, and informative what they can accomplish with a controller, it is not a hacked console.