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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

#221

Post by Silhouette »

scholia wrote: post #218
Silhouette wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be too much paranoia here. The thing is, I don't think avoiding Windows 10 is an overreaction at this point. The default behaviour is highly intrusive. The accompanying privacy policy makes it clear that Microsoft are allowing themselves to hoover up large amounts of personal data. (The first warning sign is that desktop software even needs a privacy policy.) The new business model, starting with giving Win…

> The new business model, starting with giving Windows 10 away for free There isn't a new business model, and Microsoft is not giving Windows 10 away for free. What it is offering is a free upgrade to Windows 10 to people who have paid for Windows 7 or 8. This isn't really any different from iOS and Android users getting free upgrades on devices they have also paid for. It's what people expect. > Finally, for most us…

You have just stated that there isn't a new business model, and then immediately described in considerable detail a dramatic change where lots of people get a free new version of the OS (which has not happened before) and that new version is no longer a traditional desktop OS like previous versions of Windows but instead a new kind of thing that is about being cross-platform, cloud-friendly, mobile-first, service-driven, and generally more like what Google or Apple would offer. You also glossed over all the spyware and the ads that you can pay^Wsubscribe to remove even running basic software locally on your own system, though you did mention some of the other paid services that Microsoft have made pretty clear they will be promoting via Windows 10. If that isn't a fundamental (and user-hostile) change in business model, I don't know what is.

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

#222

Post by viewer5 »

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.

> It's pretty common practice for a .com to run its backend stuff on the .net version of their .com domain.

Meaning the .com is basically just the UI that sends all its information to the .net to be processed, then back to the .com to be rendered? What's the benefit of that to the company, instead of having it all on the .com site?

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

#223

Post by scholia »

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

Which is turned off by default....

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

#224

Post by simoncion »

viewer5 wrote: post #222
simoncion wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's pretty common practice for a .com to run its backend stuff on the .net version of their .com domain. Meaning the .com is basically just the UI that sends all its information to the .net to be processed, then back to the .com to be rendered? What's the benefit of that to the company, instead of having it all on the .com site?

> Meaning the .com is basically just...

Sort of, yeah.

I can't tell you why you'd want to have a front office/back office split like that, but I could speculate: Domains are cheap, and it might reduce cognitive overhead to have a .com/.net operational split.

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

#225

Post by a3n »

morganvachon wrote: post #212
a3n wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a desktop OS, try OpenBSD, Slackware Linux, Debian, or Arch Linux, > or if those are too obtuse (they can be difficult for the uninitiated to get into) try Ubuntu or Linux Mint. For the uninitiated I'd cut to the chase and go straight to Linux Mint, there's just less to contend with. Some time after initiation, depending on interests and needs, maybe work your way back up the stream to Ubuntu or Debian, or port…

You're probably right, I was thinking back to my first real Linux learning curve with Slackware around 2000-2001. I dived in head-first and I'm glad I did, what I learned doing that built a foundation that has served me well.

Yeah, and you did that because you had to back then. :)

Thinking more about my post, I left out the option of just staying with Linux Mint after a noob gains experience.

Not that I'm anything like a role model, but it's my default personal distro, because it doesn't try to be the main focus of my computer experience, it just gets out of the way lets me focus on the work.

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

#226

Post by scholia »

ionised wrote: post #179

Yeah I noticed this and was very annoyed. I use Comodo firewall and have basically set up a load of rules to prevent phoning home of any kind except to check updates.

Does that mean you're blocking CDNs? What's the effect on performance?

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

#227

Post by simoncion »

prawn wrote: post #170
jdmichal wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would only freak out because some tech person is presenting the information to them in a way that makes them think they should.

Tech people are the first ones to freak out about it. ;)

A non-technical person's computer is often a source of agitation for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes those reasons are reasonable. Sometimes they are not.

I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors by speculating what Aunt Tilly might think of a long list of human-unfriendly domain names.

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

#228

Post by iancarroll »

simoncion wrote: post #224
viewer5 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty common practice for a .com to run its backend stuff on the .net version of their .com domain. Meaning the .com is basically just the UI that sends all its information to the .net to be processed, then back to the .com to be rendered? What's the benefit of that to the company, instead of having it all on the .com site?

> Meaning the .com is basically just... Sort of, yeah. I can't tell you why you'd want to have a front office/back office split like that, but I could speculate: Domains are cheap, and it might reduce cognitive overhead to have a .com/.net operational split.

Part of it is removing extra data when requesting style sheets and such - there's no need for a browser to send all of the set cookies it has for your web application when it's fetching styles, so people buy separate domains for them.

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

#229

Post by tacticus »

dc_gregory wrote: post #39
bsilvereagle wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The australian market where most providers bill at least a MB for every connection session (1B over some arbitrary time and you're down one of your MB)

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

#230

Post by nathanaldensr »

The following fix worked for me. I don't see any outbound traffic on Fiddler when typing searches in the Start menu or when actually running the search. Granted, Microsoft needs to make this MUCH easier to do; the VAST majority of Windows users have no idea what group policies are.

1. Run gpedit.msc

2. Navigate to Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Search

3. Set the State to Enabled for "Do not allow web search", "Don't search the web or display web results in Search", and "Don't search the web or display web results in Search over metered connections"

4. Reboot

Enjoy. :)

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