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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 number6 on Sunday August 23 2015, @08:04AM
I found a textfile saved on my computer a long time ago (it's a comment posted at a forum around 2006).
I thought it may be of further educational interest to share it with you guys, in situ . . . . . .
"Well in a twisted way it is in your control, but more of an all or nothing way. All these lookups ("Using XP") as an example are priority based. So in a sense you could over-ride those priorities ("Not suggested") here is what I mean:
If you look at this registry key on XP;
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\ServiceProvider
You will see ("If you have the defaults"):
DNSPRIORITY: 2000
HOSTSPRIORITY: 500
LOCALPRIORITY: 499
NAME: TCP/IP
NETBTPRIORITY: 2001
PROVIDORPATH: %SystemRoot%\System32\wsock32.dll
The lower the priority ("If found there") trumps anything higher. Problem is, Microsoft is nervous with their domain names and would much rather trust DNS in all cases, no matter what you would like your other domain names to resolve by.
So, if you were to use these priorities which are default they would work like this in this case, minus Microsoft Domains:
1. Local DNS Cache
2. Host file
3. ICS ("Depending on if you use it") hosts.ics
4. DNS
5. Wins
6. blah blah blah
So imagine if somehow your DNS cache was hacked, and redirected Microsoft sites to another IP, you would be SCREWED in that case without this code in place. Since DNS cache is used prior to the host file based on the default priorities."