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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @08:34AM
Possibly because only the people with those requirements shop at your shop. Walmart and others have plenty of selection for everyone else. That's where my parents were sent when they were looking for a new laptop. "But we don't know what to look for" - "The screen. Make sure it has a good screen that you can see without needing a magnifying glass. Even the cheapest laptop you'll find will have at least twice as much power as you need".
Turns out they got a Windows 8 laptop, so we had to install Classic Shell. Other than that, the software they need is called Firefox (nobody wants to clean in IE-infected PC), Libre Office (WGA checks have made pirating MS Office too much trouble), and Gramps (https://gramps-project.org/). Plus I had to install Thunderbird, because they can't figure out the GMail interface.
All that software runs at least as well on Linux. But Windows is what they know.