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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: 3, Insightful) by Ayn Anonymous on Saturday August 22 2015, @11:20PM

    by Ayn Anonymous (5012) on Saturday August 22 2015, @11:20PM (#226430)

    Who want bet how long it takes until someone is successful in a DNS attack of the MS data collecting server ?
    [ ] 1-4 weeks
    [ ] 1-3 month
    [ ] 3-6 month
    [ ] 6-12 month
    [ ] 12+ month
    This is the holy grail in computer hacking !
    Imagine the reward if you are successful: Millions of fullz (google it). $$$$$$$
    MS of course ignore the latest research in DNS bit squatting. http://dinaburg.org/bitsquatting.html [dinaburg.org]
    Get the Bitsquat Domain NOW ! Collect the world wide Windows 10 keyboard traffic RIGHT NOW.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 23 2015, @12:12PM

    by VLM (445) on Sunday August 23 2015, @12:12PM (#226648)

    What would make you think the NSA hasn't already done so? I mean why guess solely in the future with no evidence it hasn't already happened?