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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: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:36PM
Smart nerds on soylentnews can easily fire up Wireshark and reveal the communication for themselves.
And just what are the not-so-smart nerds supposed to do? Oh, I see: not smart enough to do network analysis, but smart enough and nerdy enough (and by golly, people like them!) to not use Micro$oft in the first place!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:21PM
> And just what are the not-so-smart nerds supposed to do?
If Win10 only periodically phones home to the mothership, like just once a week, even being smart won't be enough, its going to take lots of effort to catch it in the act.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:24PM
No it doesn't. Just monitor traffic to those domains. A very simple filter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:04PM
If your average russian botnet can use random domains so can micro$oft.
(Score: 1) by massa on Saturday August 22 2015, @11:09PM
Let me fix that for you: JUST DON'T ALLOW ANY TRAFFIC TO those domains. Blacklist them on the router. And in the hosts file.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tftp on Sunday August 23 2015, @02:11AM
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.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Sunday August 23 2015, @02:39AM
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
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.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 23 2015, @02:22AM
If I'm smart enough to use encryption and VPN's to bypass government censorship, then I suppose that Microsoft has probably figured that stuff out. Microsoft has been battling botnets long enough to have learned how to run one, don't you think?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 23 2015, @02:41AM
You assume that those are the only ones. To trust that all have already been found is sort of naive. To discover new ones requires actual monitoring.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:23AM
To think the subject is prevention is odd. The subject is how to verify the stories claims easily. A filter on a traffic capture is just that. Please read in context before the ad hominems next time.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday August 24 2015, @04:10AM
You're kind of thin skinned too aren't you?
That comment was to a starting comment wherein the writer wondered what the less-than-uber-geek was to do -- I can't figure out if that poster was being sarcastic or not about avoiding MS' products.
So you see, when you responded to that blockquoted comment above with "just look at the specific cited domains", the context had nothing to do with story confirmation. In fact, the comment you commented on, was pointing out just how much work figuring out all the domains MS uses would be. In that context, your comment suggesting filtering on specific already known domains when the topic was to find out all the active domains, was -- to be extremely charitable -- naive.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday August 22 2015, @09:47PM
As TFS says, once per 30 min.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:26PM
Doth protest too much. Wireshark is easy. It is just like any other program. Tinker for a few minutes. If anything isn't clear just search around and, well, read. What nerds do.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:54PM
I'm a little concerned. I would certainly hope that this is all done through an SSL collection, otherwise usernames, passwords, etc, can be grabbed by basically *anyone* who happens to be along the route. Anyone read TFA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:19AM
I'm a little concerned that they might actually collect usernames and passwords at all. If they do, that is totally unacceptable, regardless of whether they encrypt the transmission or not.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Saturday August 22 2015, @11:39PM
Actually, I would assume that all nerds would see is encrypted data, as TFS mentions that they configured a HTTPS proxy that Microsoft conveniently ignored [Internet Standard, what the fuck are those?]...
(Score: 2) by TheB on Sunday August 23 2015, @01:50AM
Has anyone on SoylentNews tried to verify this yet?
I am interested in finding out if this article is BS or Mircosoft is truly that evil.