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Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

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Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#31

Post by georgemcbay »

mahouse wrote: post #3

Do "normal" applications look blurry on high DPI screens?

Applications that don't mark themselves as explicitly handling High DPI correctly will be autoscaled up by default in a way that does look pretty blurry (basically their GDI canvases are being bitmap scaled from much lower resolutions for final display) because blurry is better than unreadably small as a default.

You can opt out of this on a per-app basis (right click app icon, Compatibility tab, select "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings") and have them just display everything really tiny if you prefer that. This is actually a decent option if the app has its own scaling but doesn't properly interact with Windows to enable it. I still run Sublime Text 2 and have it set to disable High DPI scaling and then just use a bigger font point size to make the text readable; also used to do the same with Chrome back before it had proper High DPI scaling on Windows (disabled DPI scaling, then just used the normal web page render scaling).

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#32

Post by [deleted] »

jonahx wrote: post #26
blinkingled wrote: post #19

It's the new norm apparently - everyone is doing this. Apple gives OS X away but nobody has yet got the memo that you are becoming the product. (Yosemite does exactly that by default - you can disable it though.)

which setting is it under?

[deleted]

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#33

Post by Macha »

Paul_S wrote: post #8

Reminds me of when canononical did something similar with ubuntu and extended searching your applications to searching merchandise on amazon and other stores. It's really funny when you open the start menu equivalent at work to launch the terminal* and as you type "t" you get to see items you can buy - one of them being "The Simpsons". Genius. * before you complain I use the start menu to launch the terminal: I never…

This behaviour bit me in the ass in work today. Had a new Mac, just installed Polycom (our video conferencing program), typed Polyc out of habit in spotlight to launch it, ended up on the wikipedia page for polycystic ovarian syndrome...

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#34

Post by chatmasta »

This also happens on iOS with spotlight. As far as I can tell there's no way to turn it off.

Source: MITM your iOS traffic.

Sidenote -- a possibly unforeseen side effect of end to end encryption everywhere is that it makes it far more difficult to man in the middle your traffic and hold companies accountable for their privacy policies.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#35

Post by eterm »

bsilvereagle wrote: post #17
CSDude wrote: post #12

Ubuntu does the same by default if you do not disable it via Privacy. Not suprised that MS does this, however the sad part is for a simple search, there are literally thosaunds of bytes exchanged

> there are literally thousaunds of bytes exchanged For people on capped connections, this is a nightmare. 4kB/search, for using your computer normally! Even though 100 searches/day is only 12MB of data/month, the fact that Microsoft thinks it's okay for the OS to slurp data like this boggles my mind.

If people slurp data from a single source they can have that data easily be made "free" by the network providers, and so are then sold back to again.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#36

Post by justThis1Post »

As time goes by, computer software begins to feel more and more hostile to the user. When I installed Windows 10, all the privacy settings made me feel like I was wrangling a beast rather than setting up something that would help me.

I don't know if there's any solution or if privacy is just a remnant of the past. Is Linux any better? And is there any way to own a smartphone which is built not to leak my information, either through the operating system or through 3rd party apps that request access to everything on the phone?

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#38

Post by justThis1Post »

blackbeard wrote: post #25

I'm starting to think I need to worry about things getting out of my firewall more than things getting in.

Couldn't agree more. These days we have to protect ourselves more from our own software than from viruses. Assume any software is a trojan horse, even the OS.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#39

Post by dc_gregory »

bsilvereagle wrote: post #17
CSDude wrote: post #12

Ubuntu does the same by default if you do not disable it via Privacy. Not suprised that MS does this, however the sad part is for a simple search, there are literally thosaunds of bytes exchanged

> there are literally thousaunds of bytes exchanged For people on capped connections, this is a nightmare. 4kB/search, for using your computer normally! Even though 100 searches/day is only 12MB of data/month, the fact that Microsoft thinks it's okay for the OS to slurp data like this boggles my mind.

It seems a bit unlikely that users doing 100 searches a day would also be the same set of users who worry about 12MB of data usage in a month.

For example, even in the Australian market (very low competition environment), 12MB of data via 4G is trivial.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#40

Post by pedalpete »

The start menu is a combination web-search and local search. How could it not 'phone home' on a web search? Note the address it is 'phoning home' to is Bing.

As far as what the contents of the package being sent is, I'll assume it is more information than necessary, and probably over-reaching until they get a slap on the wrist, but to call this phoning home is probably a stretch in itself.

-- Edit -- Apparently the search still phones home even if search is disabled, which makes my point mostly... pointless.

I still suspect that this was an example of Microsoft (intentionally) over-reaching and that they'll backpedal on this now that it has been brought to light.

Shame is, it feels like they are breaking any goodwill that the community may have still had left for them.

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