I have to wonder how soon it will be before torrent clients just start faking their user agents and pretending to be from older versions of Windows.
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Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites
291–300 of 358 posts
Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites
#292Basically M$ adoption of this strategy is the death knell for any semblance of privacy on the PC. It's amazing how far we have come to accepting such draconian measures in order to further marketing. There is still time people, come on over to Linux, the privacy here is still fine and will continue to be fine. And if you come over, then all the desktop software makers will port their software to Linux and all the col…
Windows 7 is the last Microsoft OS I will run. Never used it for work anyways and very rarely game anymore. Maybe I can even find a way to run BNet on Linux. You can have all the freedom you want. Nobody is forcing you to use those programs.
I got fed up with Windows when XP was released. I've been running 64bit Linux since.
Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites
#293Earlier 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. So far I can assure you: Compared to my Android phone Windows 10 is absolutely mute. There're no noticeable differences compared to Windows 7. You seem to be more driven by your hatred towards Microsoft than by real privacy concerns.
>>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…
I'm going to recommend deadlisting/disassembly instead. Network analysis doesn't give as much context for exactly what is sent, and there seems to be - as far as I can see, yet? - a total lack of hard data and verifiable evidence about what all this "telemetry" actually is, what can be turned off, what can't, and what actually gets sent to whom, when, from what, and why.
The "evidence" I have seen so far that Windows 10 communicates with its maker is, let's be honest, pretty scaremongery and includes things like LLMNR traffic - which is link-local! - and neglects to consider that Windows Update now checks much more frequently (because of the accelerated release cadence of a rolling release) and essentially torrents its updates now, P2P-style.
If there's a real privacy issue - and there may well be, especially on default settings - we need reliable, detailed, hard information to see what binaries send what to where to begin to address it, and to see what can be turned off, what should be, etc. Does anyone know if anyone's begun that analysis yet?
(Of course it really should be Microsoft openly discussing this, but in the absence of that, the mantle inevitably falls to independent researchers.)
Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "password sharing" feature of Windows 10 is sufficient reason for me to never allow anyone with Windows 10 access to my network. Ever. That's the way I'll opt out. Not by changing my SSID.
Sharing your password via Wi-Fi Sense to your friend gives him access to the network, but no knowledge of your password and no ability to share it. Sharing your password via word-of-mouth gives your friend your password and access to your network and the ability to share it further.
> Sharing your password via Wi-Fi Sense to your friend gives him access to the network, but no knowledge of your password and no ability to share it.
Are you sure? Does "netsh wlan profile SSID-Name key=clear" not show it after you've connected?
Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The cheap and easy way to do this is to buy a hub and plug it into your router the computer you want to analyse and another computer.
If you happen to have a computer with both WiFi and ethernet (many/most laptops these days), set it up as a bridge, connect the Windows machine to one of those interfaces and use the other one to connect to the internet.
Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites
#296Earlier 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." Strongly disagree. I have no trouble getting around in KDE, Cinnamon, Mate, XFCE or i3. They are all just fine.
Somewhat disagree. I use GNU/Linux-based OSes as my primary systems (because alternatives are less usable for my purposes), and I perceive them all being an ugly mess of barely cooperating pieces of software with piles of hacks to force those to work together.
Seriously, I don't have enough fingers on my hands to count different UI toolkits (every other one having its own font rendering, duh), service/daemon management subsystems, audio subsystems and VFS implementations, each having incompatible API and behaving differently. Every other program has its own standards - what would happen upon just clicking a link heavily depends on where you do this. Most software "somewhat works", not "works just fine". Besides, maybe, the very core GNU userland, which is, indeed, rock solid and quite consistent.
I'm unaware of alternatives, though. Fear, there aren't any.
Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand that there are legal barriers around it per the privacy policy but the fact that someone at Microsoft can just decide that they need file X off my laptop and then fetch it is way beyond the pale. If someone wants the files off my laptop, they can get a search warrant and successfully convince my lawyer that I am legally obliged to decrypt.
There is no evidence that Microsoft currently has the ability to arbitrarily fetch files from your computer. If your argument is that they could implement such a capability, that's always been true for any OS, including free operating systems, unless you audit the code and compile it yourself.
The issue isn't whether the functionality is currently built-in (it'd be trivial to add later). The issue is that Microsoft states its intent to do so (relevant section underlined):
>we may access, disclose and preserve your personal information, including your private content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or ______files in private folders______), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary...
I understand that you'd have to do a full code audit of every application that has permissions to read files off your local disks to ensure this wasn't already being done by someone, but at least as a Linux user, I'm not used to software openly expressing its intent to feed private files off to any like-minded entity that asks for them. Definitely a red flag for me.
Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites
#298Earlier 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. So far I can assure you: Compared to my Android phone Windows 10 is absolutely mute. There're no noticeable differences compared to Windows 7. You seem to be more driven by your hatred towards Microsoft than by real privacy concerns.
Deactivating the services that call home doesn't stop Windows 10 from calling home. You can only completely disable "telemetry" if you have Windows 10 Enterprise Edition and even then I'm not entirely sure it does completely shut down. And anyway, even getting to this meant manually ticking out dozens of boxes in several settings windows and installing a packet sniffer to check your own computer for unwanted connecti…
> running a packet sniffer on your outgoing connections usually means you suspect you have a virus
Windows 10 isn't the first software product to phone home, and that's what packet sniffers are used for the most.
Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites
#299Happily using OSX, Linux, and Chrome (with crouton).
I only need Windows now if I want to play a game, but the consoles at home, and steam under crouton/linux/osx solves that for some of the games I play.
Nothing else really!
Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The cheap and easy way to do this is to buy a hub and plug it into your router the computer you want to analyse and another computer.
Even easier (buying hubs is hard) and possibly cheaper (switches with mirror ports aren't the cheapest) is to just stick two network cards into your linux box, set up a layer-2 bridge and sniff everything going between.
CentOS/RedHat derivitives: https://www.banym.de/linux/centos/setup-bridge-device-on-cen...
Debian/Ubuntu: https://wiki.debian.org/BridgeNetworkConnections