SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the we-are-really-security-conscious dept.
According to The Register Microsoft plans to enable their WIFI Sense feature on all versions of Windows 10 by default.
WIFI Sense has been lurking on Windows Phones since version 8.1.
A Windows 10 feature, Wi-Fi Sense, smells like a significant security risk: it shares access to password-protected Wi-Fi networks with the user's contacts. So giving a wireless password to one person grants access to everyone who knows them. That includes their Outlook.com (nee Hotmail) contacts, Skype contacts and, with an opt-in, their Facebook friends.
With every laptop running Windows 10 in the business radiating access, the security risk is significant. A second issue is that by giving Wi-Fi Sense access to your Facebook contacts, you are giving Microsoft a list of your Facebook friends, as well as your wireless passwords.
Microsoft offers a totally ridiculous workaround: you can simply add _optout to the SSID to prevent it from working with WiFi Sense.
Microsoft's page on WIFI Sense hasn't yet made it clear that every Windows 10 computer using WIFI will have the feature on by default. But that page does also include this little gem:
Wi-Fi Sense uses your location to identify open networks near you that it knows about by crowdsourcing.
Where are the lawyers when you need them?
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday July 01 2015, @11:32AM
This is an interesting strategy. If you want to do something unpopular, do something so ridiculous it looks like parody. I can't even complain about it, this sounds so bizarre and insane. I mean, where do I even start, other than "flush the whole idea"?
Step two of course is to roll back perhaps 10% to 50% of the insanity, get the journalists and blogs to report everything is saved and fixed, and still get 90% to 50% of the insanity they originally wanted. I'm guessing shortly after the holiday the news will be released that they finally found a way to enforce market segmentation and only "home edition" will share all your security info with random people and "business edition" will not and of course cost X times as much and aren't we just the nicest corporation on the planet and everyone should love MS because they care and they feel our pain.
One interesting sci fi-like theory is maybe MS, late to the party as always, is planning on releasing a social network of its own. Now consider that my wife exclusively accesses facebook on her phone, so anything done to a windows PC is irrelevant to her (aside from the whole having a mac mini instead of a PC thing). Also work PCs are theoretically for work, but in practice all those 16 hour per day losers spend about 12 hours per day on FB and twitter and only 6 hrs/day actually working but they get credit for 16 hrs butts in seats. Now those losers will see FB blocked at corporate to prevent corporate WIFI from being powned. But no worries Microsoft Network for Business will be released, probably something like a bad clone of myspace from 2006 for theoretically business purposes. Like a linkedin but unlike Linkedin people actually use it, for fun even. And MSNB or whatever it'll be called will of course not share wifi passwords. So pretty much all facebook users with jobs (what, maybe 1/3 the countries population?) will have to move to MSNB at least while they're sitting at work. Note that I'm describing a plausible semi-interesting possible alternative future, not peering into my crystal ball and insisting this IS exactly how the future will roll.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @11:35AM
I mean, where do I even start, other than "flush the whole idea"?
If you load Windows 10 on your Zune you can 'squirt' the whole idea to your friends without needing WiFi (No) Sense.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AndyTheAbsurd on Wednesday July 01 2015, @12:10PM
Oh, MSNB will share wifi passwords - provided your company's MSNB account administrators have set up sharing with their company. This will enable synergy when businesses collaborate on....oh I feel dirty already, I can't finish that joke. Anyway, the MSNB corporate account will probably be connected to Active Directory just like Office 360 and Lync - I mean "Skype for Business" - is today, so you'll automatically get desktop notifications and shit about it.
And then some enterprising hacker will set up a FB/MSNB bridge system and the whole thing will be pointless.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.