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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

#151

Post by pdkl95 »

louthy wrote: post #134
mahouse wrote: post #3

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

It looked OK on my 4K screen when I installed it. I however fairly quickly went back to 8.1. It's soooo slow, lagging mouse pointer slow. There are lots of 'proportion' issues as well that aren't there with 8.1 (task bar too small, title bars too large), I couldn't get the Display settings to anything close to comfortable. It also looks a mess, mainly the random font sizes, but also the fact that they've tried to mod…

> mainly the random font size

That's a consequence of the cheats that MS did a long time ago in how they render TrueType. The short version: instead of properly kerning the rendering, each glyph's x-location is rounded up to the next pixel boundary, causing nasty misalignments (some of which accumulate over the line).

The long (but very interesting version: http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h...

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

#152

Post by mark_l_watson »

There may be too much paranoia here.

I installed Windows 10. I turned off Cortana web search so it now only searches for stuff on my laptop. Convenient.

I also turned off all camera and microphone use. Easy enough to turn on if I need it.

Search for "privacy settings"' hit the first link and turn off what you want. (I turned off just about everything.)

I think that as long as I use privacy badger in my web browsers, use duck duck go as my default search engine, and make sure to install security updates and scan daily, that my cheap little Windows 10 laptop is reasonably comparably privacy wise to my two Mac laptops, but less private and secure than my three Linux laptops.

Seriously, I think it is a mistake to talk non-tech family and friends out of using Windows 10. Just help them make the right privacy settings.

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

#153

Post by mrschwabe »

Gracana wrote: post #122
gnufrra wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my Mac I use Little Snitch to monitor outbound connections and I love it. I haven't found an equivalent simple and lightweight application for Windows yet.

Oh man, I am racking my brain trying to think of the tool I used to have installed on my PC at my last job. It was built by somebody who posted on HN, lightsomething or something? It would warn you about new programs connecting to the network and do other neat stuff. Not quite the same as little snitch, but similar and very pleasant to use. I'll update if I think of it (or maybe somebody else can name it.) [edit] Gla…

Is there an open source alternative/equivalent, preferably runs on Linux?

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

#154

Post by orionblastar »

Microsoft has almost always done this with Windows. Each new version had something new to phone home about. Previous Windows versions told Microsoft what apps you had installed, send in crash data, and other things.

Microsoft is doing the customer is the product thing that others have done for like the past decade. It is how they can give away Windows 10 upgrades for free, even to pirated copies, and still earn money off of it.

If you don't want to be tracked or spied upon: https://prism-break.org/

You shouldn't be using Windows but one of the free or open source alternatives instead.

HIPPA compliant offices cannot use Windows 10 because of the tracking it does and patient privacy laws.

Even worse is the Wifi sharing with social networks, if even one of your corporate employees has it turned on, their friends can get access to your Corporate Wifi and it is a security breach. You'll have crackers trying to friend employees on social networks of your company just to get the Windows 10 Wifi sharing password to get into your corporate network.

Even with all of the privacy settings turned off, there is most likely more stuff that phones home.

You know that given enough time video gamers will be forced into DirectX12 and have to use Windows 10. That business apps will be written for Windows 10 and force companies to upgrade. Sooner or later most people will have to upgrade to Windows 10 in order to run the software they need.

Woe be to the person who chooses express settings during startup. They will wonder why their Internet is so slow and woe be to them if they have a tablet with a data plan and wonder why they go over it.

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

#155

Post by kethinov »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #152

There may be too much paranoia here. I installed Windows 10. I turned off Cortana web search so it now only searches for stuff on my laptop. Convenient. I also turned off all camera and microphone use. Easy enough to turn on if I need it. Search for "privacy settings"' hit the first link and turn off what you want. (I turned off just about everything.) I think that as long as I use privacy badger in my web browsers,…

While I agree with you that people are overreacting, I think overreaction is to be expected given that MS chose pretty much the most intrusive defaults possible. People have to opt-out of this stuff rather than opt-in which causes people to lose confidence in MS.

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

#156

Post by jacobwil »

ultramancool wrote: post #75
MichaelGG wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except apps like this should probably not be using the OS CA store, and instead just pin their own CA cert. Doesn't seem to be the case here but in general I think pinning is getting more adoption, isn't it?

Not really, heck, on Android and iOS around 40% of banking apps don't even check the certificate at all. Most people, even most developers seem to be pretty clueless with this stuff.

The paper won't be available to everyone until Wednesday at [1], but:

> Altogether, of the 639,283 [Android] apps in our data-set, 45 implement pinning.

[1]: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15/technical...

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

#157

Post by snuxoll »

orionblastar wrote: post #154

Microsoft has almost always done this with Windows. Each new version had something new to phone home about. Previous Windows versions told Microsoft what apps you had installed, send in crash data, and other things. Microsoft is doing the customer is the product thing that others have done for like the past decade. It is how they can give away Windows 10 upgrades for free, even to pirated copies, and still earn money…

> Even worse is the Wifi sharing with social networks, if even one of your corporate employees has it turned on, their friends can get access to your Corporate Wifi and it is a security breach. You'll have crackers trying to friend employees on social networks of your company just to get the Windows 10 Wifi sharing password to get into your corporate network.

Your first mistake was using a simple WPA pass-phrase to secure your corporate WLAN. If you aren't deploying RADIUS and requiring users either present a valid client certificate or their domain credentials to gain access to your corporate network you have already lost - and this goes for any of your wired ports too...

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

#158

Post by arm »

gnufrra wrote: post #89
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.

On my Mac I use Little Snitch to monitor outbound connections and I love it. I haven't found an equivalent simple and lightweight application for Windows yet.

As others have mentioned, GlassWire is quite simple and lightweight. Unfortunately, while it’s absolutely invaluable for monitoring changes to the system (DNS changes, application changes (becoming unsigned, etc.), webcam and microphone changes, etc.), its firewall is too simple compared to Little Snitch. Unlike Little Snitch, which lets you choose which domains and ports an application is and isn’t allowed to connect to as it attempts to make those connections, GlassWire only allows you to either allow all connections an application makes or deny all connections an application makes. NetLimiter¹ is much closer to Little Snitch in this regard (example²).

Personally, I’d recommend using a combination of GlassWire for monitoring system changes and NetLimiter for the firewall.

――――――

¹ — http://www.netlimiter.com/products/nl4

² — http://www.netlimiter.com/Files/ImageGalleries/netlimiter-4-...

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

#159

Post by cm2187 »

kethinov wrote: post #155
mark_l_watson wrote: post #152

There may be too much paranoia here. I installed Windows 10. I turned off Cortana web search so it now only searches for stuff on my laptop. Convenient. I also turned off all camera and microphone use. Easy enough to turn on if I need it. Search for "privacy settings"' hit the first link and turn off what you want. (I turned off just about everything.) I think that as long as I use privacy badger in my web browsers,…

While I agree with you that people are overreacting, I think overreaction is to be expected given that MS chose pretty much the most intrusive defaults possible. People have to opt-out of this stuff rather than opt-in which causes people to lose confidence in MS.

The problem is how do you know that you succeeded at this whack a mole game of switching off all these features? And given this new cavalier approach, what confidence do you have that another of these call home things will not be quietly introduced through these new non optional automatic updates?

I personally choose to pay a premium for my mobile by using an iphone rather an android precisely because I am put off by this constant intrusion into our privacy. So I am not exactly thrilled to see Microsoft adopting the google approach.

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

#160

Post by prawn »

simoncion wrote: post #118
prawn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really disturbing how many would be indistinguishable (to almost everyone) from malware servers. Lots of .net domains and entities I've never heard of.

It's pretty common practice for a .com to run its backend stuff on the .net version of their .com domain. Also, if you know how CDNs tend to structure their DNS entries for their clients, you can remove all but seven of those entries from the list.

No average joe is going to know any of that though. If they saw or heard about that list, they'd be confused or freak out.
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