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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
(Score: 2) by seeprime on Saturday August 22 2015, @09:57PM
So Windows as a service means that Microsoft is collecting information that corporations can buy and governments can collect to track the citizen minions. The "as a service" part is pure bullshit. I still buy Windows OEM licenses to install on new PC's. It's not free at all. The users getting "free" upgrades are paying a price in ads, and crapware apps, which we remove on our customer computers. The additional information is equivalent to theft of user data. It is not a service that benefits the consumer at all. This is very disappointing and if Microsoft doesn't clarify what the hell they are doing the Linux desktop/laptop user base will continue to grow above the current 1.8%.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @12:50AM
People will just roll over and accept it.
My previous employer, a biege box retailer, used to tell customers that Apple and Linux customers were disappearing because they were all so jealous of Microsoft's success that they wrote most of the malware for Microsoft Windows, and were all going to jail.
Mind you, he also proved (to himself) that Firefox was just a front-end for Internet Explorer. (I asked him how I could cross-compile for Windows from Linux, if I had no Internet Explorer libraries to tie into, and his response was that he didn't care, he had proved it.)
Anyway, people believe without question what he says because he's been doing it for so long (around 20 years).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @03:01AM
There is a theory out there that firefox doesn't even really exist, but is just a theme for IE? So all this hubbub about firefox means nothing? What were the provings?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:43AM
It's not really a theory to anybody but this particular guy.
He was having problems connecting to websites in Firefox, so he claims he reset IE and that fixed it.
It's worth mentioning that this shop owner doesn't understand exactly how 10.1.1.x and 192.168.1.x differ. He's a legend in his own mind, willing to rip people off in the name of his religion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:53AM
...I got distracted halfway through my writings, and forgot to mention that it's most likely he reset the TCP stack for Windows.
The guy is currently battling me over an aftermarket heatsink, telling me the graphics subsystem on my old mainboard was damaged by the aftermarket heatsink I installed when my i7 reached 98 degrees celsius. You see, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo, according to this guy, "modifies the ZIF socket" and the moment I installed it I baked the system, even though I ran it for 18 months without a problem.