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posted by LaminatorX on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'll-be-watching-you dept.

The administrator of AE News (an online news portal for Czech and Slovak expatriates) writes a very revealing article regarding the Windows 10 collection of user data. Here is the original Czech article. Here is a Bing translation to English. Here is a English condensed version translated by a blogger. And finally a PDF of the original Czech article.

In the post the AE News administrator states:

With the advent of Windows 10, I decided to undergo several tests. The collected knowledge for someone may be alarming. The Windows operating system 10 is essentially the end terminal, more than the operating system, because many of the processes and functions of this system is directly or indirectly dependent on remote servers and databases to Microsoft.

All text typed on the keyboard is stored in temporary files, and sent (once per 30 mins) to:
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
pre.footprintpredict.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com

AE News also references an arstechnica.co.uk article which states it might be impossible to stop this communication:

And finally, some traffic seems quite impenetrable. We configured our test virtual machine to use an HTTP and HTTPS proxy (both as a user-level proxy and a system-wide proxy) so that we could more easily monitor its traffic, but Windows 10 seems to make requests to a content delivery network that bypass the proxy."

arstechnica.co.uk also "asked Microsoft if there is any way to disable this additional communication or information about what its purpose is". Microsoft did not reply as to a way to disable this chatter but did respond to the 'additional communication' stating Microsoft is now 'delivering Windows 10 as a service'.

Although the original source for this story is skeptical, Smart nerds on soylentnews can easily fire up Wireshark and reveal the communication for themselves. It appears that MS has fully embraced the cloud where your OS is now a terminal. And regarding privacy? Well, according to arstechnica.co.uk: Windows 10 privacy policy is the new normal


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:12PM (#226348)

    I can assure you that my business will not be using windows 10 in any capacity. My content is private, proprietary, and in some cases classified.

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  • (Score: 5, Touché) by ikanreed on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:33PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:33PM (#226358) Journal

    Good job, now watch the IT bureaucracies of major corporations not give a damn.

    • (Score: 3, Disagree) by SomeGuy on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:43PM

      by SomeGuy (5632) on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:43PM (#226364)

      Oh, they give a damn... about the kickbacks they get for deploying Windows 10.

      • (Score: 1) by anubi on Monday August 24 2015, @02:53AM

        by anubi (2828) on Monday August 24 2015, @02:53AM (#226794) Journal

        Especially if they are in a position to force the rest of us into it... such as requiring it for signing up for healthcare or processing income tax.

        Noncompliant people can always be instructed to "upgrade to a supported browser" and those that do not have no way of complying with laws already on the books mandating compliance with doing certain things.

        Note one can no longer go to the library or post office to get mail-in IRS tax forms anymore. I flat do not trust any of these income tax businesses to keep my affairs private... they are businessmen, and they will do whatever is allowed them to do to make a buck, and that includes sharing anything they get from us. I know the day is coming soon when I will be flat required to submit my tax to my government via some company hiding behind "hold harmless" clauses, or the internet while being forced to use insecure javascript laden servers.

        I have tried to enroll for government mandated healthcare over the internet, but have yet to get an operable server that does not hang up on me and do stuff like put me in a loop or send me pages with inoperable buttons.... or worse yet, incomplete pages where certain options simply do not display at all.

        --
        "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
        • (Score: 1) by dr zim on Monday August 24 2015, @02:18PM

          by dr zim (748) on Monday August 24 2015, @02:18PM (#227023)

          Note one can no longer go to the library or post office to get mail-in IRS tax forms anymore

          Put away the tin foil hat, sparky... you can still go to http://www.irs.gov/Forms-&-Pubs [irs.gov] and download .pdfs of any form you need and print out as many as you like.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:37PM

      by frojack (1554) on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:37PM (#226387) Journal

      Don't bet on that.

      Bigcorp is not all that happy about potentially incriminating data being held by others.
      In fact, I could see some very deep pockets launching lawsuits against Microsoft, as well as those uppity EU agencies dragging them back into court. As for the US authorities, expect no action, Microsoft is after all, doing the governments bidding on this.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:46PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:46PM (#226389)

        Would be hilarious if EU required spying features to be removed from the N editions, and Microsoft offered a download to put all the spying back in. After all, you wouldn't want to use the N editions, would you? They're not feature-complete!

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by MrGuy on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:11PM

      by MrGuy (1007) on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:11PM (#226414)

      Tell it to the finance industry. Or the legal industry. There are DEFINITELY a large number of companies who care deeply about the privacy of the information on their own machines, and they absolutely WILL tell the IT department what to do.

      Mike

  • (Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:18PM (#226379)

    Of course, by all means try the competition. We'll see you crawling back because You are already vendor-locked-in.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:04PM (#226727)

      Munich says otherwise.
      Their guys have found replacements for the closed-source EULAware they had been using.
      In the process, they have saved millions.
      The last numbers I heard was that they are over 96 percent FOSS and mopping up the final non-FOSS bits.
      (EULAs previously had them running a ridiculous IT ecosystem including 21 versions of Windoze.)

      The autonomous region of Extremadura in Spain converted 80,000 boxes of their public IT infrastructure to all-FOSS in 1 weekend.

      The Gendarmerie Nationale (French militarized police) have converted their 90,000 boxes to all-FOSS.

      The Penn Manor school district has converted to FOSS.

      The public school system of Brazil uses Linux exclusively.
      It is the largest Linux deployment worldwide (500,000 seats in 2011).

      Last I heard, Panasonic, Inc. was the second-largest Linux deployment at 300,000 seats.

      After getting stung by the Business Software Alliance for $100,000, Ernie Ball, Inc. converted to Linux and hasn't looked back.
      Regarding M$, CEO Stuart Ball has used the phrase "When pigs fly".

      Sounds like the "locked-in" Windoze-only folks should be talking to the folks who have **already** shed their shackles.

      -- gewg_