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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) by massa on Saturday August 22 2015, @11:13PM

    by massa (5547) on Saturday August 22 2015, @11:13PM (#226428)

    I think you should resolve the names and block the addresses on the firewall, too.

  • (Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday August 23 2015, @02:21AM

    by tftp (806) on Sunday August 23 2015, @02:21AM (#226493) Homepage

    I think you should resolve the names and block the addresses on the firewall, too.

    If you keep Windows Update enabled, it can change those addresses. Are you going to reverse engineer every DLL in Windows after every update? Who has time for that? Worse still, even if educated users do so, the majority will not. They will be playing with their flashy gadgets and point fingers at us, new luddites, because we only use computers that we personally built and programmed. Until that is made illegal or impossible, of course - like if every ISP requires crypto authentication of the endpoint, and only MS has the key. You don't think that it's likely?