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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: 5, Insightful) by https on Saturday August 22 2015, @11:51PM
I just had a thought on why the MS Office ribbon is so useless - they collected telemetry from people so dumb they didn't uncheck the "monitor me" box.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acharax on Sunday August 23 2015, @12:30AM
It's not just the ribbon, their telemetry nonsense is also behind the removal of the start menu.
Other companies such as Google and Mozilla are using similar statistics to justify axing features they don't want to maintain any longer. It's really a self-fulfilling prophecy, rely on a feature only a computer illiterate user will leave enabled and you have free reign to remove everything you don't want to maintain from the code base (with the excuse that nobody is using it - because none of the people you monitor do). In Google's case they removed a tool that they first burried under a submenu (where nobody that didn't already know it existed would look for it) and surprise surprise a few month after moving it to the submenu they remove it completely because "nobody was using it" (I'm talking about the ability to download full cached copies of PDF files if anyone wonders).
In Microsoft's case they employed this with the start menu to justify removing it entirely, they made it more and more convoluted since 9X - in XP you had the option to change it back to classic mode and disable all of the "smart" features, in 7 people just pinned the couple or so programs they frequently use to the top of the menu so the remainder of the menu fell into disuse where average users were concerned - when they later decided to shove their tablet interface down everyones' collective throat these usage statistics doubtlessly came in very handy.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @03:14AM
They need to take everyone doing research right now and have them write "Just because the null hypothesis is false does not mean my preferred explanation is correct." 100k times. Give them a year, its only ~300 a day. Shut down all government funding of research by people who have not done that and require that as homework before getting any grant. The same money can be used as a stipend for that year.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Sunday August 23 2015, @05:25PM
100000aJust because the null hypothesis is false does not mean my preferred explanation is correct.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @08:15PM
Um... the entire windows 8 gui was described as being based on the telemetry data from users that were too dumb to disable the feedback.
Most of the great ideas going into MS products were based on the fact that the people that had a clue disabled the reporting, and the people that didn't... had backgrounds of icons in the shape of a penis. www.thewebsiteisdown.com explains this very well, and is from long before windows 8.
I think the discovery that the ribbon made it hard to disable feedback is a few years too late.
What I want to know is how in my task scheduler, all sorts of client experience feedback stuff that I never opted into was enabled and reporting daily. I can assure you, the ribbon did not prevent me from saying no. The problem is that I do not recall being asked if I'd like to report my activities on a daily basis.