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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

#101

Post by brudgers »

Silhouette wrote: post #66
brudgers wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an email address or two or more. Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Apple, Microsoft, etc. all have nodes in their graph irrespective of my use of their products or services. They have all read some fraction of my emails. There's location data on me going back potentially 18 years since I got my first cell phone. There's potentially IP logs going back to 1993 when I first went on the internet. I'm possibly in direct…

Running away from the firepower effectively means living the digital life of Stallman. Writing as someone who has been the victim of a data-driven screw-up and spent several months of having life turned upside down while trying to fix it, I am increasingly wondering if Stallman has been right all along. More practically, privacy is not a binary measure. We all interact with other people and organisations, and data ge…

Privacy is a cluster concept. Implicitly, it includes the idea of constraints on others. The most effective constraint is that others simply don't care and that's most of what privacy boils down to accept in a few corner cases covered by legislation and the existence of legislation implies that in those cases others do indeed care and hence the legal restraint.

It is clear that Stallman was and is right in regards to the technical dimensions. It's not like we can go back to the time when email was private. STMP never was, that's why Stallman chose his course so long ago. Email is more private today thanks to STMPS. The same is true for HTTP/HTTPS. But even in the old days, there was nothing to prevent someone from publishing your love letters in the school newspaper. It was just more difficult.

Privacy generally breaks into security or anonymity. The issues surround either authorization and identification. Both have always been mostly limited by interest more than anything else. Computers have reduced the cost of being interested and so long as we use computers the djinn isn't going back in lamp.

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

#102

Post by scholia »

Silhouette wrote: post #44
saiya-jin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prov…

I'm sure Microsoft care very much about their business customers, which is why this seems such an odd strategic move. As you say, why try to copy a company like Google's business model when they have their own well-established one? I'm half-wondering whether the plan has always been to prioritise the consumer market with Windows 10, and they're taking a reasonable punt on the fact that most businesses won't upgrade f…

Agreed. Windows 7 is still a current Microsoft product and I don't think Microsoft is expecting the bulk of enterprises to move until 2020, if not later.

And since Windows 10 is to a large extent a move into remote PC management, Microsoft obviously wants to manage them with as much info as possible. Telemetry is the quid pro quo for free upgrades for the life of the device.

The handful of geeks (somewhat less than a billion users) who are capable of managing their own systems obviously don't like this. However...

> the negative initial reaction they've been receiving in recent weeks

Public interest has been phenomenal, the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, and most people seem to be very happy with it.

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

#103

Post by bhouston »

Given that it is proven that the NSA spied on European companies for economic reasons, this isn't a good idea. Now the NSA can just tap into Microsoft, either covertly or through court order, and spy on the whole world.

Details of economic spying -- may not be the best article but the easiest to find:

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/nsa-spied-on-french-economy...

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

#104

Post by chopin »

ised wrote: post #85
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…

Change the gateway on the Windows 10 install computer (or "default route" as another commenter calls it) to a computer _you_ control, i.e., a UNIX install, that can do IP forwarding. Turn on IP forwarding. Connect the UNIX install to the internet. Also change your default DNS servers on the Windows 10 install to point to the UNIX install. If you know how, set up DNS on this computer. I recommend using your own cache…

If one can master all this, wouldn't it be easier to use a non-Windows box in the first place?

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

#105

Post by blackbeard »

jevgeni wrote: post #75
blackbeard wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can you trust any cloud service then?

I don't and never have done for personal use.

I literally have an IMAP box and nothing else.

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

#106

Post by antsar »

kuschku wrote: post #94
ultramancool wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to use a software firewall and here's what I've blocked so far... https://up1.ca/#JQqL3y0xqLZnxaOlYQ0s6A And this is on a machine running Enterprise with privacy settings cranked, and most stuff disabled via group policy. I'm trying to avoid blocking updates, but svchost is still out there talking to random microsoft servers. The worst part is that I can't differentiate between the servers used for t…

Here’s an image link to your image that actually fucking works: http://i.imgur.com/i4ydV1a.png

Thank you.

Javascript is required to view and upload files.

No, it is definitely not.

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

#107

Post by aluhut »

ised wrote: post #85
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…

Change the gateway on the Windows 10 install computer (or "default route" as another commenter calls it) to a computer _you_ control, i.e., a UNIX install, that can do IP forwarding. Turn on IP forwarding. Connect the UNIX install to the internet. Also change your default DNS servers on the Windows 10 install to point to the UNIX install. If you know how, set up DNS on this computer. I recommend using your own cache…

The problem is that it is not an user friendly solution. It will only help those people who do have several OS running or are capable of understanding.

The privacy settings that do not work were pretty good hidden already and many are scared away already. This second level is even worse.

What we need is a simple tool where you set check boxes to fix it all. That would be a solution for the target audience.

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

#108

Post by wfo »

PythonicAlpha wrote: post #33
thescrewdriver wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With such an argumentation, you could just trash any terms. As long as they are not against any law, they are valid, as long as they do not contain something that is totally unexpected (for example that you must pay Microsoft additional fees above the normal price). I also think, that Microsoft should be held accountable -- but it starts with those terms! I think, many people just rushed into Windows 10, because it w…

Terms and conditions as a requirement to use a product you've already purchased shouldn't ever count for anything. So I think you should trash any terms. And I'd hope in a civilized country if a company tries to use mandatory-accept 300 page terms and conditions to abuse their customers a judge would step in and say "no."

And this is absolutely unexpected. That's why there's a very popular post on ars technica and hacker news and reddit with tons of well-informed technical people surprised about it and pretty pissed off.

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

#109

Post by wtallis »

chopin wrote: post #104
ised wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change the gateway on the Windows 10 install computer (or "default route" as another commenter calls it) to a computer _you_ control, i.e., a UNIX install, that can do IP forwarding. Turn on IP forwarding. Connect the UNIX install to the internet. Also change your default DNS servers on the Windows 10 install to point to the UNIX install. If you know how, set up DNS on this computer. I recommend using your own cache…

If one can master all this, wouldn't it be easier to use a non-Windows box in the first place?

Of course not. Setting up OpenWRT to do this is a lot less work than migrating your entire workflow to a new operating system.

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

#110

Post by Silhouette »

scholia wrote: post #96
Silhouette wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

god forbid Microsoft try to deprecate OSs after nearly 13 years. You seem to have invented a decade. Windows 8 RTM was just over 3 years ago. Also, while I have some sympathy with both the idea that software isn't perfect and the idea that Microsoft need a viable business model, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a product like Windows 7 to come with essential support for a significant period of time, perhaps…

> I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a product like Windows 7 to come with essential support for a significant period of time, perhaps based on the expected working lifetime of devices where the software is normally installed. Under Microsoft's software lifecycle policy, operating systems are normally supported for 10 years. So, for example, we already know that support for Windows 7 ends in 2020, unless it's…

Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that Microsoft's current support periods are somehow bad. On the contrary, I think they have historically been by far the best in the industry, and that this has been a strong argument in favour of building serious software on Windows.

All I'm saying is that a significant period of support -- longer than the 3 years the posts I was replying to seemed to be suggesting -- is a reasonable expectation for this sort of commercial software, because the developers are supplying an imperfect product in the first place.

In contrast, if the new version of Windows with its compulsory updates removes that ability to keep what you actually bought working as well as it was when you bought it, that is not a good thing, any more than it is when Apple have dumped support for old versions of iOS or OS X well before the end of the useful lifetime of devices they ran on. The position that the software industry wants to keep changing things so everyone else should be forced to keep up whether or not it's actually in their interests is not something I can support.

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