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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: 5, Insightful) by tftp on Sunday August 23 2015, @02:11AM

    by tftp (806) on Sunday August 23 2015, @02:11AM (#226492) Homepage

    JUST DON'T ALLOW ANY TRAFFIC TO those domains.

    At some point you will grab your laptop and go somewhere else. There you will connect via an open WiFi, or through your friends' WiFi, bypassing your router... and you will notice that your laptop is happily uploading tens of GB of stuff that it could not upload from your home. Or... you are using wired Ethernet at home, but your neighbor has an open WiFi. Windows may activate the wireless card (what can you do about that? there are no mechanical switches) and connect. You will never know.

    It is very difficult to defend yourself because you need to close all holes, all the time, without seeing the code - whereas Windows needs only one hole, at least once. It is much safer to avoid using such an "OS". Even WinXP will be safer, with all ports closed at the built-in firewall, unless you surf the worst corners of the Internet with IE.

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  • (Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Sunday August 23 2015, @02:39AM

    by el_oscuro (1711) on Sunday August 23 2015, @02:39AM (#226500)

    That is why my laptop is running Kali Linux: "The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear"

    --
    SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @10:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @10:46AM (#226635)

    and you will notice that your laptop is happily uploading tens of GB of stuff

    Despite repeated advice against it, my mother sold her soul and bought a Macbook, iPad and iPhone. Our once responsive though low Mb broadband connection instantly slowed to a crawl. The router revealed that the iShits were perpetually hogging all available bandwidth, making it barely possible to even load a web page on another computer. When I told the crapple fanboys at work they wouldn't even believe me.