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Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

arstechnica.co.uk

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Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#21

Post by brudgers »

Silhouette wrote: post #15
brudgers wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discussions about differences in behavior among versions of Windows would not be as informative as a discussion of Windows in comparison to other OS's. Ubuntu bounces stuff off Canonical servers, iOS off Apple's iTunes and in-the-wild Android...well where to begin? Facilitating high connectivity is what modern mass market operating systems do and Microsoft is playing catchup not leading a charge against anonymity. Th…

Facilitating high connectivity is what modern mass market operating systems do That's a bold claim, considering that until recently Windows was exactly what you used if you didn't want that kind of always-online emphasis and instead wanted to retain a degree of control and running your software locally. Like many of the software companies moving in user-hostile directions, Microsoft's biggest competition is still the…

Having owned 3.1, 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, 7, and 8 boxes and been paid to use 2.0, NT and Vista, my experience has been that each version [except Me which was meh] has been significantly better...and the amount of improvement from version to version has been markedly increasing...that is, 8 a larger improvement on 7 than 7 was on Vista. People can legitimately disagree on the meaning of "user-hostile". If the way in which people have voted with their wallets in favor of convenience over anonymity, then the view that Microsoft's OS is user-hostile appears not to be in an ascendency [which I am not saying makes it wrong].

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#22

Post by cautious_int »

Windows 10 seems to transmit information to the server even when OneDrive is disabled and logins are using a local account that isn't connected to a Microsoft Account.

Well there you go. If you ever wondered whether this is happening only on the Microsoft Account(tm).

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#23

Post by revmoo »

brudgers wrote: post #13
jammycakes wrote: post #7

In all these discussions about Windows 10 phoning home, there are a couple of things that I haven't yet seen properly discussed. 1. Do the different versions of Windows (Home/Pro/Enterprise/Education) behave differently? If so, how? 2. Do the pro/enterprise versions behave differently when they're connected to a domain? I'd imagine that the answer to at least one of these questions would be "yes." This kind of behavi…

Discussions about differences in behavior among versions of Windows would not be as informative as a discussion of Windows in comparison to other OS's. Ubuntu bounces stuff off Canonical servers, iOS off Apple's iTunes and in-the-wild Android...well where to begin? Facilitating high connectivity is what modern mass market operating systems do and Microsoft is playing catchup not leading a charge against anonymity. Th…

You are utterly delusional

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#24

Post by Silhouette »

brudgers wrote: post #21
Silhouette wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facilitating high connectivity is what modern mass market operating systems do That's a bold claim, considering that until recently Windows was exactly what you used if you didn't want that kind of always-online emphasis and instead wanted to retain a degree of control and running your software locally. Like many of the software companies moving in user-hostile directions, Microsoft's biggest competition is still the…

Having owned 3.1, 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, 7, and 8 boxes and been paid to use 2.0, NT and Vista, my experience has been that each version [except Me which was meh] has been significantly better...and the amount of improvement from version to version has been markedly increasing...that is, 8 a larger improvement on 7 than 7 was on Vista. People can legitimately disagree on the meaning of "user-hostile". If the way in wh…

If well-informed people have voted that way with their wallets, or otherwise, then I agree and of course that's their choice.

However, my big concerns with a lot of modern technologies are firstly that non-geek users don't understand what they are really signing up for and secondly that even if people do understand what they're signing up for it doesn't matter if effectively the only choices available to them all have the same problem.

I've lost track of how many friends and family have said just-plain-wrong things about what social networks do with their data, for example, or think that posting some comment on their Facebook page about how they don't consent to it will actually have any practical or legal effect.

And to pick on another example that's been much discussed recently, it won't matter that you have security and/or privacy objections to your car spying on you and phoning home with your location 24/7, if insurers are all offering car makers serious money to install those features, and since drivers are often required by law to have motor insurance they have no choice but to "opt in" if they want to drive at all. At that point, there is a complete failure of competition in the market, caused by the artificial distortion of having actual laws that constrain even well-informed people from making the choices they might otherwise prefer to make. We are fast heading that way with general computing as well, where for practical or even legal purposes we are required to do some things on-line, yet the only tools being offered to get us on-line come with these strings attached.

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#25

Post by Hello71 »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #20
jorgecastillo wrote: post #10

I am sticking with Windows 7 until I get out of college and after that I am ditching Windows forever.

God forbid Microsoft give 7 the boot for support like they did XP. Windows 7 is standard for workstations at the college administration where I work, and suggestions to switch to 8 are met with laughter across the board. We have trouble enough with China trying to hack us literally thousands of times per day, and there is no reason to trust Windows 10 to be any more secure.

> We have trouble enough with China trying to hack us literally thousands of times per day

you mean you did "tail -f /var/log/secure".

> God forbid Microsoft give 7 the boot for support like they did XP.

god forbid Microsoft try to deprecate OSs after nearly 13 years. note that in 2001, the newest Linux kernel available was in the 2.4 series, with many people still using 2.2.

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#26

Post by inversionOf »

irixusr wrote: post #11
elcct wrote: post #8

Is Microsoft paying for that traffic?

In canada that's a big concern

It's a concern anywhere with caps, which increasingly includes much of the US as well. FWIW I'm in Canada and recently my provider (Cogeco) switching my 120Mbps plan to unlimited data per month, which is nice.

This actually brings up a great point which is that systems need some sort of bandwidth conservation setting. We recently were traveling and had a couple of laptops and pads with us. Having no data connection at the hotel we were at, I enabled tethering on my smartphone.

Last than an hour later I got a warning that they had blown through my 5GB. This wasn't active use, but literally was largely laptops auto downloading patches (they hadn't been turned on in a couple of weeks, backlogging GBs) and browser updates, pads pulling a tonne of updates, etc. It is becoming completely unmanageable.

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#27

Post by thescrewdriver »

PythonicAlpha wrote: post #14

You agreed to the privacy terms, so you are at the mercy of whatsoever Microsoft implemented. Windows 10 even could totally ignore your settings. I say this, not because I think that this is OK, but to reflect, that even the change of the settings do not save you from the harm, that was done from the privacy terms! Why downvoted? When you disagree, than give arguments, not gutless clicks!

Very few people will read the privacy terms. Just because they have a document people clicked 'agree' below without reading doesn't mean that MS should not be held to account for what Windows 10 is leaking. For many users not using Windows isn't an option.

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#28

Post by saiya-jin »

Silhouette wrote: post #17
tempodox wrote: post #6

Maybe I'm just jaded, but does that really surprise anyone? Most “developments” at MS have been nothing but successive layers of lipstick-on-a-pig. No amount of lipstick can make the pig underneath go away.

It doesn't surprise me. Moves in this direction were likely as soon as Nadella was chosen to be the new CEO and all but certain as soon as they announced the free upgrade push for Windows 10. It does disappoint me, though. Microsoft was one of the few major players in IT that could realistically have offered an antidote to the always-online, spy-on-everything, everything-is-a-service, subscribe-not-buy, force-updates…

they clearly don't care about their business customers, since this kind of childish behavior is a strict no-go for most companies with at least slightly decent IT.

Fair enough, they actually create big holes in the market that startups can eventually fill in. Albeit it won't be easy (replacing Active directory, Exchange and Office suites), rewards are worth it. With that, Microsoft as desktop and server solution provider is a history.

Still not getting why they want to copy Google's revenue stream, when they have solid base in vastly different areas...

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#29

Post by Kenji »

blackbeard wrote: post #5
bsilvereagle wrote: post #2

> 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. Does this mean a Win10 machine setup to use something like Tor will leak the user's actual IP back to…

I've been on Windows 10 for a couple of days now. VPN traffic doesn't leak if the default route is the VPN interface. I tried it and my firewall went silent apart from the tunnel. I have absolutely no fucking idea what it is sending out though. It's always talking to something. I've turned everything off that is documented and use a local account and remove-appxpackage'd everything. Sorry but this release is a write…

Can't you just redirect all that stuff it sends to 127.0.0.1 by editing your hosts file?

Re: Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft

#30

Post by k3d3 »

PythonicAlpha wrote: post #14

You agreed to the privacy terms, so you are at the mercy of whatsoever Microsoft implemented. Windows 10 even could totally ignore your settings. I say this, not because I think that this is OK, but to reflect, that even the change of the settings do not save you from the harm, that was done from the privacy terms! Why downvoted? When you disagree, than give arguments, not gutless clicks!

That doesn't make it okay
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