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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 28 2015, @10:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the time-for-port-mirroring dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by dltaylor on Saturday August 29 2015, @12:30AM

    by dltaylor (4693) on Saturday August 29 2015, @12:30AM (#229261)

    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).

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