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Windows 10 Still Phones Home to Microsoft Even When Told Not To
Peter Bright at ArsTechnica [arstechnica.com] reports:
Windows 10 uses the Internet a lot to support many of its features. The operating system also sports numerous knobs to twiddle that are supposed to disable most of these features, and the potentially privacy-compromising connections that go with them.
Unfortunately for privacy advocates, these controls don't appear to be sufficient to completely prevent the operating system from going online and communicating with Microsoft's servers.
On the face of it some of the traffic seems innocuous enough, although this sets a worrying precedent especially given Microsoft's forced patches that will push feature upgrades as well as security fixes. Winaero has a useful guide [winaero.com] to blocking many of the servers that Windows 10 likes to report to (along with many further tips and hosts file entries listed in the comments), although how private you can keep your desktop in the future remains to be seen.
Have any Soylentils been tempted to fire up a Windows 10 instance in a VM and monitor its network activity? And most importantly is the Premium Upgrade [wired.co.uk] for ad-free solitaire for a year worth the cost?
