Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 267 posts

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

#131

Post by lambda »

rsync wrote: post #98
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…

Look. Seriously. I don't want to be a brat, but what is the possible overlap between people caring to use Tor (for whatever reason) and people using Windows 10 as the host OS ? You're at the absolute cutting edge of spyware-in-the-home, defective by design, obscured infrastructure that was designed from the ground up to be user hostile in every conceivable dimension. And you're going to run Tor on that. There's a phr…

> I don't want to be a brat, but what is the possible overlap between people caring to use Tor (for whatever reason) and people using Windows 10 as the host OS ?

Journalists.

There are many journalists who need to cover sensitive topics, who are not particularly technically literate. They need to be able to buy a system off the shelf, do some minimal and easy amount of installation of privacy protection, and be reasonably confident that it will work and they will not be outing their sources to whatever particular despot is listing in.

Of course, Tails is a better solution for that. But in terms of being able to allow them to do their job as easily as possible, it would be preferable for them to be able to install the Tor browser bundle on their existing OS rather than having to learn an entirely new one (and possibly dual boot in order to run some Windows-only software, and not keep it isolated well enough and thus leak information accidentally).

It apparently took a while to teach Glen Greenwald enough of how to use Tor and GPG in order for Snowden to be able to communicate with him. We need to make this process easier, not harder.

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

#132

Post by ultramancool »

antsar wrote: post #121
ultramancool wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up1 uses client-side crypto, so in this instance it is. No real point here though, but I use ShareX with it, and it's nice to be able to deliver screenshots and stuff like this privately.

What's the point of client-side crypto in a browser? Can't you be served backdoored JavaScript that no longer does proper encryption, and you'd be none the wiser?

Yeah, you have to trust the site and their providers of course. But how do you know your OS provider doesn't serve you backdoored updates? Until it was abused by malware, Windows Update used to accept stuff signed by a 512-bit RSA key. Do you personally reverse engineer every binary you accept?

This will change soon though, they're working on browser extensions which will keep all content client side too.

EDIT: Clarified some points, added a little more detail.

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

#133

Post by redml »

thescrewdriver wrote: post #36

Until recently Microsoft had taken a far more reasonable approach to privacy than say Google. Anyone remember the MS "gmail man" ads mocking the way Google inspects your email when MS doesn't? It seems that MS under Nadella has taken a decidedly Google-like turn away from privacy with Windows 10. MS seems as hell-bent as Google and Facebook to collect as much data about you as possible, even if it is for seemingly in…

At least with google I know they're trying to sell me ads and I'm the product.

With windows 10, I have to pay for the software, and somehow I'm still the product? I don't know their end game, and its really sketchy.

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

#134

Post by bad_user »

irq-1 wrote: post #100
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…

> If I don't know what it's doing, how can I trust it? It's not enough to examine software: if you don't trust the company , then anything they say or promise is worthless. Automatic updates can change anything, including the TOS! This is the same company that sells a 1984-Telescreen (XBox) with an always-on camera and microphone. _NSA shouldn't be forgotten. Oracle likes to tout Java as GPL, but what does that matte…

The source-code in OpenJDK can be inspected and OpenJDK itself can be forked if Oracle's stewardship goes awry, which is the whole freaking point of open-source, so I don't see how that can compare with Windows or iOS.

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

#135

Post by k3d3 »

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

Works fine for me

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

#136

Post by worklogin »

rsync wrote: post #98
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…

Look. Seriously. I don't want to be a brat, but what is the possible overlap between people caring to use Tor (for whatever reason) and people using Windows 10 as the host OS ? You're at the absolute cutting edge of spyware-in-the-home, defective by design, obscured infrastructure that was designed from the ground up to be user hostile in every conceivable dimension. And you're going to run Tor on that. There's a phr…

Look. Seriously. Like, totally.

Not everyone interested in Tor is educated enough to reinstall an OS. Or they need Windows for something else they do. Or 50 other things. Or maybe we're concerned about VPN leakage, or any other thing than tor that we might use to obfuscate traffic.

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

#137

Post by ultramancool »

uxcn wrote: post #125
ultramancool wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually some GPOs to turn this stuff off. I'm running Enterprise on my desktop... the problem is that many of them don't work or only disable the UI, but still connect out to random Microsoft servers. How the hell does Microsoft think that's acceptable in an "Enterprise" product?

This was something I was wondering about. It seems like any company that has proprietary data to protect or privacy laws to comply with (most) don't even have a choice. I personally don't use Windows a lot, but even knowing that information was being sent out by default would be a deal breaker for me. Can you give some examples of the stuff that does actually have switches?

> Can you give some examples of the stuff that does actually have switches?

Yeah, if you disable the Search thing in the start menu for example, it _does_ stop sending your queries to Bing. That switch does work. It just sends a bunch of tracking info instead.

On Enterprise, you can also disable telemetry which does appear to work.

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

#138

Post by bad_user »

sliverstorm wrote: post #129
irq-1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I don't know what it's doing, how can I trust it? It's not enough to examine software: if you don't trust the company , then anything they say or promise is worthless. Automatic updates can change anything, including the TOS! This is the same company that sells a 1984-Telescreen (XBox) with an always-on camera and microphone. _NSA shouldn't be forgotten. Oracle likes to tout Java as GPL, but what does that matte…

Or as I like to put it, at the end of the day you have to trust someone, somewhere in the chain. In the case of software vendors, you have to trust the vendor. You cannot independently verify everything. You do not have the expertise nor the bandwidth. Edit: and if you have the software audited, are you not then trusting the auditor?

I don't like this argument. It's not necessarily you who has to audit your software. You can pay other people to do it. Big companies can pay for it. Your government's institutions can pay for it. If on the other hand the software is closed-source, then that's not an option. And especially for governments and for big companies Windows is a security liability.

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

#139

Post by irq-1 »

bad_user wrote: post #134
irq-1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I don't know what it's doing, how can I trust it? It's not enough to examine software: if you don't trust the company , then anything they say or promise is worthless. Automatic updates can change anything, including the TOS! This is the same company that sells a 1984-Telescreen (XBox) with an always-on camera and microphone. _NSA shouldn't be forgotten. Oracle likes to tout Java as GPL, but what does that matte…

The source-code in OpenJDK can be inspected and OpenJDK itself can be forked if Oracle's stewardship goes awry, which is the whole freaking point of open-source, so I don't see how that can compare with Windows or iOS.

> OpenJDK itself can be forked

Tell that to Google.

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

#140

Post by satai »

irq-1 wrote: post #139
bad_user wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source-code in OpenJDK can be inspected and OpenJDK itself can be forked if Oracle's stewardship goes awry, which is the whole freaking point of open-source, so I don't see how that can compare with Windows or iOS.

> OpenJDK itself can be forked Tell that to Google.

Android wasn't fork of OpenJDK
Post reply on HN