Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites • Hacker News Board

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#211

Post by Beltiras » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 2:30 PM UTC

jsf666 wrote: post #130

Beltiras wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Enterprise version (reportedly) can disable the call-home "feature". Even that is in contention thou. Yes. I think this is a massive mistake on Microsoft's part.

Or alteast you think it does. The thing is as I said with a rooted box, after it's rooted you can never be sure there ain't no backdoor left. It doesn't need to regularly communicate with an external server, it can probably dump data at some odd dates so it's much harder to track. The thing is there is no damage control with a botnet client by design like Windows 10

Didn't I qualify my statement and choose words to castigate Microsoft? It's amazing to me that keylogging is now reduced to injecting something into hosts and decoding their protocol. The latter may be tricky but knowing MS security record, inevitable.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#212

Post by djrogers » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 2:30 PM UTC

nirvdrum wrote: post #106

benburton wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else would you detect the operating system of the client making the request?

I have no idea if the the trackers are doing this or not, but you could use TCP/IP stack fingerprinting. It's a bit costly, so I doubt it's in use. But it could be one way to achieve it. It's certainly not 100% accurate, but my experience with nmap is the detection works surprisingly well: https://nmap.org/book/man-os-detection.html

That requires the server to be able to make network requests to the host - not gonna happen for most users busting your site.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#213

Post by ionised » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 2:32 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #36

adrianb wrote: post #6

Has anyone compiled a privacy checklist for Windows 10? What settings people have determined are best to use? I was somewhat forced to do the upgrade and didn't have the time to explore all settings (also they got more confusing since Windows 8).

Here's what I did: 1) turned off everything in the Customization section at install 2) Used http://pxc-coding.com/portfolio/donotspy10/ 3) Used https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking Then, I installed a traffic monitoring tool - and surprise surprise - I still found some stuff trying to randomly connect to Microsoft's servers, similarly to what Peter Bright from Ars discovered (btw, "telemetry" can only be f…

> http://pxc-coding.com/portfolio/donotspy10/

This one looks interesting but I'd be wary of using it unless source code was available.

The site it is hosted on doesn't appear to have much in the way of info about the author or anything either.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#214

Post by HelloNurse » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 2:34 PM UTC

forgotmypassw wrote: post #207

Amezarak wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the toggle switches are under the Privacy screen in the Settings window.

Not really, there's a bunch of other options that are not in the privacy section and need to be explicitly toggled off in the scheduled tasks manager (I forgot what was the name of it).

Until an official, signed, mandatory update from Microsoft installs something worse.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#215

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 2:36 PM UTC

progman wrote: post #107

cletus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing about Linux on the desktop "works fine". It's horrible. UI seems to be one area that benefits--almost demands --a central planning authority. I'm reminded of Supported Features [1]. There is some great open source software out there. But I'm struggling to think of great open source software with a good UI. Not that I'm saying Windows is good mind you. My personal preference would be OSX, which you can view as…

> Nothing about Linux on the desktop "works fine". It's horrible. This claim is usually made by Windows users who don't want to invest any effort and time to learn another desktop -- which they had to do in Win8 anyway. Linux offers several nice desktops (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, E17, etc.) which we can freely choose from. I am a Linux user since the 90's and I have always used it as my primary desktop. It works perfectly w…

It's funny, but my gripes with linux aren't the UI.. I use an Ubuntu Server VM via SSH most of the day... my desktop is windows, my laptop is OSX, and the computer I use the most not working is my Ubuntu HTPC (Unity)... I actually like Windows 7's UI the most.. though 10 is tolerable after disabling all the damned search options.

That said, every single time I've tried to use a Linux OS either as my primary laptop or desktop OS I experience significant problems that no end user should have to deal with... the last time, I added a drive after install... the system updates included an update to grub.. next reboot, wouldn't even load... after 3 days of setting up my environment, applications, vmware, etc, etc... I can't even fucking boot.

The time before that I couldn't get both monitors to work... twice before that I picked recommended hardware for linux support (straight intel graphics) and hit weird regressions when the OS updated on one, and the other just some wierd suspend issues..

I agree "works fine" for the desktop is a huge stretch... it does appear to mostly work okay for my HTPC, except when it resumes from suspend there's no sound (fortunately it's got an ssd and reboots fast), or that if I happen to turn it on too early before the TV is on, the display doesn't come on the screen (guessing it picks the DV port instead of the HDMI)...

either way.. still stuff that's worked in windows/osx forever, without issue.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#216

Post by microtonal » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 2:38 PM UTC

weland wrote: post #148

microtonal wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. Besides driver problems, missing support for newer OpenGL standards, fragmentation of desktop environments and a dozen of other problems, it doesn't even have GUI isolation (meaning that any X11 application can sniff your keyboard input): http://www.hackinglinuxexposed.com/articles/20040705.html http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2011/04/linux-security...

> Besides driver problems As long as you stay away from perpetually-beta distributions that I shall not name, driver problems are really a non-issue. I haven't had a malfunctioning peripheral under Linux in a very long time now (years?). Driver problems are on-par with what you see on Windows :-). > missing support for newer OpenGL standards This has been a common complaint about OS X for a long time, and no one thou…

As long as you stay away from perpetually-beta distributions that I shall not name, driver problems are really a non-issue. I haven't had a malfunctioning peripheral under Linux in a very long time now (years?). Driver problems are on-par with what you see on Windows :-).

I recently installed a workstation for using CUDA, with X11, using nVidia's off-the-shelf packages (the Ubuntu CUDA packages have some compatibility problems).

- On Ubuntu everything worked fine first (LTS, 14.04), after some upgrade, X11 did not come up anymore. Some problem with DKMS. While debugging, it doesn't help that Canonical has made disabling the display manager completely non-sensical. Something akin to

  update-rc.d -f lightdm remove

does not work anymore. IIRC I had to pass a parameter on the Linux command-line through GRUB (really?). Of course, this was not documented in any logical place like a manpage.

- On CentOS installing the CUDA package simply gives a blank screen and you cannot switch to TTYs anymore. You still have to manually disable nouveau, etc:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140808222919-219659043-rhel...

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/842496/nvidia-drive...

Of course, this is just an anecdote. But my experience while still reading Linux forums and helping other people, it's often still work to get and keep hardware running.

I don't have much experience with Windows. But on the few HP/Dell workstations that I have set up, Windows generally worked out of the box.

As long as the desktop respects ICCCM (hint: they all tend to do) and you don't write your application using some obscure, non-ICCCM compliant toolkit, this tends to be a non-issue.

There is much more to a desktop than just being able to display windows rendered by a random toolkit, such as: consistent keyboard shortcuts, consistent look an feel, etc. Every time that I tried to switch back to Linux, the lack of consistent keyboard shortcuts drives me crazy (though they are typically somewhat consistent within the applications provided by KDE, GNOME, etc.).

it's just as easy for a malicious user to keylog you on Windows or OS X

OS X uses GUI isolation, only applications that a user has explicitly enabled in the accessibility options can listen in on keyboard events or send events. Moreover, app store applications use sandboxing by default and can't see files outside the sandbox. So, this is false.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#217

Post by joesmo » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 2:38 PM UTC

stinos wrote: post #9

But there is less concrete evidence to support the pirates’ most worrying claims. less , or just none (e.g. the claim about data being sent from local disk)? In any case this is turning to be far from ideal for MS and makes me wonder if they really didn't see this coming when defaulting to not-so-private defaults: I already know people asking 'I heard this new Windows sends all your data to Microsoft, is that true?'…

Any junior level engineer, product manager, or professional panhandler could have seen this coming. Microsoft is betting on their marketshare and the stupidity of their average customer, as they have always done in the past. Unfortunately, out of 4 OS releases, 3 have been outright failures (Vista, 8, 10), one was decent (7), and even your average computer using idiot is aware of the horrible software quality that Microsoft is putting out these days because they have to use it. While disasters like removing the Start button are much more prone to stir ill will in privacy-ignorant consumers than privacy concerns, I'm sure there are no shortage of bugs in Windows 10 to further antagonize Windows users to the point that they might start to care about privacy and see it as just another way they're getting fucked over by Microsoft (which it is). In my testing for example, the Edge browser is completely unusable and can't even paint its own window. With software like that and all the privacy concerns, it's likely Windows 10 will have even less adoption that 8. I guess all the executive shifting and layoffs really can't change Microsoft's root problems (but at least they're now releasing interesting open source software.)

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#218

Post by analog31 » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 2:39 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #84

kuschku wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t we remove them from dnsapi.dll? Decompile dnsapi.dll, remove all hardcoded hosts, replace and protect to a nonexistent group so that windows can’t even override it during an upgrade.

Or just switch to a less hostile operating system. As more things move to the web, this is becoming a very reasonable proposition.

I love my touch screen. How's touch screen support on Linux?

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#219

Post by kefka » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 2:39 PM UTC

keithpeter wrote: post #74

stinos wrote: post #9

But there is less concrete evidence to support the pirates’ most worrying claims. less , or just none (e.g. the claim about data being sent from local disk)? In any case this is turning to be far from ideal for MS and makes me wonder if they really didn't see this coming when defaulting to not-so-private defaults: I already know people asking 'I heard this new Windows sends all your data to Microsoft, is that true?'…

I use a free operating system (Linux, currently Slackware) because I take property rights seriously. Years ago I decided that I did not want to use 'cracked' software and didn't have much money. Strange how things turn out.

> I use a free operating system (Linux, currently Slackware) because I take property rights seriously.

That's weird. Physical property rights are very different to Intellectual Property Rights (copyright, patent, trademark).

IPR can lead you to absurd conclusions: I own a DVD, and copy data to it, and the data is under copyright, the DVD now belongs to 2 different parties ?!

Or, if I develop a widget, and manufacture it, it can somehow violate a patent and I now owe them large sums of money... or the patent holder can use the customers that purchased them?!

Or I grow crops on my field using seed stock form our family. And Monsanto patented plants' spores cross-pollinate into your field. Now, you either are required to destroy your seed stock because of genetic pollution, buy Monsanto seed, or lose your farm. Yet again, IPR removes rights from property holders.

So yes, you may take property rights seriously. But IPR leads to insane conclusions and absurd reasoning. IPR exists to take physical property rights away from you.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#220

Post by bitwize » Mon, Aug 24, 2015, 2:39 PM UTC

danlindley wrote: post #181

smtddr wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I've deactivated all reporting and services that call back home (at least which I was aware of). In addition I've installed glasswire to check the network activities. I'm going to recommend to you, or anyone, wanting to verify Windows 10 network behavior to do it without depending on software running on the OS itself. Try verifying it again using network analyzing software on linux or macosx, running downstream of…

Could you recommend a resource that would provide some good information on this? I keep hearing about ways to modify routers to operate this way, but have yet to come across something that clearly describes how this is done.

Use a Linux box (a Raspberry Pi, for example) as a router/AP.