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With the release of Windows 10 there have been serious privacy concerns raised as to what data Windows is sending home to mommy and daddy. Much of this could be called benign data leakage for your average user (location information for a map, search information, etc) but it has been hinted that even disabling these features doesn't prevent data being sent from your computer. This is also true for Android, iOS devices, browsers, browser plugins, and software registration / update tools. Even a vanilla Linux or BSD install may be sending out information you aren't aware of. If you haven't checked, you don't know.
Firing up a packet monitor is fairly easy on the host OS and a decent firewall / gateway can dump all the packets from a local network. Assuming the majority of data you would be concerned about leaking out is encrypted, is there an easy way for an owner to decrypt it to see what is actually being sent out? Are there groups conducting this type of analysis and publishing their results with any level of detail?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Justin Case on Saturday August 29 2015, @12:23AM
Hey I'm a Microsoft hater from way back, but in this case even some of our open source favorites are piling on. Ubuntu and Firefox have a lot of "phone home" or "phone elsewhere" stuff that you didn't explicitly request.
I had a wonderful firewall years ago that would tell me whenever a connection was opened to a previously unseen IP address, and let me allow, block, or keep prompting. Unfortunately the maker discontinued support.
So yeah, pipe everything through a firewall on another box.
But how do you know the firewall isn't phoning home too?
1 GOTO 1
(Score: 4, Informative) by dltaylor on Saturday August 29 2015, @12:30AM
Sounds like ZoneAlarm for Windows or NetBarrier for the Mac; liked them both, but re-replacing the offending OS vendor libraries after each update was a pain.
A clean *BSD stripped down to pure firewall/NAT/DNS/DHCP functionality generates no unexpected traffic that I can find (port-mirrored switch so I didn't rely on internal libraries/kernel).
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday August 29 2015, @05:25AM
But how do you know the firewall isn't phoning home too?
Because it runs OpenWRT. Or it runs OpenBSD. Or similarly trustworthy software. Trust nothing commercial. No I'm not some hippie Bernie Sanders fan or baked Ronulan but seriously, you can't trust any software anymore that doesn't let you sync their repo and build an image yourself. Even if you don't actually do it, knowing you COULD keeps them honest because they know somebody IS doing exactly that and looking around in that source before they build it to see how it differs from upstream... and somebody is looking at most of the upstream projects these days and decades old bugs are getting closed. Because it isn't paranoia anymore when just everybody is out to do ya.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday August 29 2015, @05:27AM
Assuming the majority of data you would be concerned about leaking out is encrypted, is there an easy way for an owner to decrypt it to see what is actually being sent out?
Really?
Really?
Help, I can't even snark that one because my brain hurts too much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @03:21PM
Mmmmmmm. Baked Ronulan.
It goes wonderful with a nice chianti.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Saturday August 29 2015, @09:08PM
Sadly, as a counterargument of sorts, you can't trust your hardware either. So even a free/open source OS won't give guarantees on the hardware (expecially with what's currently possibile with modern hardware)
The sad conclusion is that there is no way to be ever 100% sure. Sigh.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @02:37PM
But how do you know the firewall isn't phoning home too?
By having access to the source code. This is why open source matters.