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German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

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Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#111

Post by rasz »

maxxxxx wrote: post #24

I am surprised that they using server names like "alpha.telemetry.microsft.com". when I see something like "microsft" in an E-mail or link I immediately suspect that somebody is trying to fake being from Microsoft. Or are these spelling errors in the article? Edit: these domain names are in the report too. Very strange. I would get very nervous if I saw "microsft" in a firewall log.

>alpha.telemetry.microsft.com

its right there with spynet2.microsoft.com and spynetalt.microsoft.com ;). Plus you have to remember W10 spy^^telemetry switches to hardcoded IPs if DNS fails.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#112

Post by BurnGpuBurn »

ragequitta wrote: post #64
Spooky23 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. Microsoft software deployment on client is a dumpster fire. Blindly installing Windows updates these days is very dangerous and should be avoided. Your best approach for avoiding malware is to use browsers like Firefox and Chrome. Critical task workflows should be in LTSB, iOS or ChromeOS. Microsoft’s guidance is to have around four deployment rings each for Windows and Office, and only immediately patch…

Very much disagree. If you pay attention at all to security you'll always hear stories of that one client who hasn't done security updates in 3 months (or 3 days) and gets taken out by the inevitable "exploit Wednesday" shenanigans. On top of that if you're in an enterprise environment when you update you've already had months of home users beta testing the stuff (if you've chosen the semi-annual channel), haven't yo…

> someone who has had 0 problems since beta

Well, you really must be the only one then. Or perhaps the rebooting every other week for updates, sending around privacy sensitive telemetry information to the entire world and having Cortana use the most CPU cycles of all the apps installed is not a problem for you. Some people just accept whatever buggy stuff is thrown over the fence, and that's fine, but don't say there's nothing wrong with it.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#113

Post by rasz »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #104
metildaa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could just block all communication with Microsoft by the OS. Or, move to non-Windows OSes like the retail giants already have. Kroger and Walmart run Suse Enterprise Linux (relevant Uptime Funk reference) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYRlTISvjww

> Could just block all communication with Microsoft by the OS. Easier said than done when there's a minefield of firewall-bypasses for it.

Care to elaborate? Afaik and tested w10 does NOT bypass its own firewall when set to 'drop all' traffic.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#115

Post by imhoguy »

heybrendan wrote: post #57

(More) direct link to the publication: https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/BSI/Cyber-Si... Page 31 of the report was of primary interest--hosts hard-coded in diagtrack.dll: geo.settings-win.data.microsoft.com.akadns.net db5-eap.settings-win.data.microsoft.com.akadns.net settings-win.data.microsoft.com db5.settings-win.data.microsoft.com.akadns.net asimov-win.settings.data.microsoft.com.akadns.net db5.vort…

> akadns.net

That is Akamai CDN TLD. Blocking that at this level may break a lot of sites/services. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/9663/what-is-th...

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#116

Post by vetinari »

Delmania wrote: post #31
jcoffland wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a tool to safely remove all Windows 10 telemetry. It's called Linux.

Great let me know when Linux can run the apps I need for work and I can reliably install it on any hardware and expect it to work without issue. I like Linux as anyone else around here, but to claim it can replace Win10 for the average user is a stretch.

> let me know when Linux can run the apps I need for work and I can reliably install it on any hardware and expect it to work without issue

Did you ask the respective vendors? It's you who is giving them money; it's on you to ask for what you want. If you don't ask, the sales teams do not know what to work with.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#117

Post by Klover »

vetinari wrote: post #110
winrid wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word is light-years ahead of any open source alternative. Gimp is not a photoshop replacement. These guys don't care about Apache on their desktops. :)

Most people do not use any advanced features, neither in Writer nor in Word. You can congratulate yourself, if your colleagues know what are styles, most just hard-code the formatting.

If this “normal users are stupid” thing is supposed to be in favour of Linux then it’s a stale argument.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#118

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu »

alasdair_ wrote: post #83
Myrth wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess, it was a typo in client and they've registered misspelled domain as easiest fix for backwards compatibility with affected old releases.

>My guess, it was a typo in client and they've registered misspelled domain as easiest fix for backwards compatibility with affected old releases. It was created in 1996, so likely not. Although that expiration date is interesting... Domain Name: MICROSFT.COM Registrar: MARKMONITOR INC. Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 292 Whois Server: whois.markmonitor.com Referral URL: http://www.markmonitor.com Name Server: NS1.MSFT…

I don't know what WHOIS database are you using, but it's outdated. The real dates are:

Updated Date: 2018-07-31T09:30:41Z

Creation Date: 1996-09-02T04:00:00Z

Registry Expiry Date: 2019-09-01T04:00:00Z

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#119

Post by kakarot »

einr wrote: post #106
kakarot wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure, I tried doing it myself once and it was a rabbit hole of scripts and changing obscure settings in the command line. After somewhere between 12-18 hours of solid work there was still so much left open, and I came to realize it's simply impossible to have a copy of Windows 10 that doesn't spy on you in some way. For example, hardware profiling. Attach a printer to Windows 10, Microsoft will receive the hardwa…

With support for Windows 7 Professional ending in 2020, I'm not sure where to go from here. Maybe you'll be able to do what some folks did with Windows XP and use a registry hack to trick Windows into receiving security patches for Windows Embedded POSready 7, which is the embedded Point-Of-Sale version of Win7. This is going to be supported until 10/12/2021. Of course, this is a very fragile and hacky solution that…

As it is, I run Windows in a VM with IOMMU, firewalled incoming connections, host-level VPN, etc., passing through a Geforce 1080 for direct access, and I only use it for specific purposes. Everything else is done in other VMs that run Linux. It's a similar setup to Qubes.

I also do music production and graphics and game programming in Windows, so I'm totally with you on how fucked this is going to be in a year. One of my biggest issues is that I know for a fact my fb2k visualizer doesn't work under Wine.

One possible solution I've thought about for using a non-networked W7:

* Set up a separate VM with allocated storage that gets broadcast as a set of read-only local network drives

* Add both W7 and this VM to a private network without net access

* Access the netdrive on W7 and copy any files with which you need write access to a W7-only storage partition.

Seeing as how we seem to have similar use cases, I'm happy to give you some pointers on setting up something similar to what I have.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#120

Post by emilsedgh »

johnduhart wrote: post #78
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>let me know when [...] I can reliably install it on any hardware and expect it to work without issue. Consider yourself told, then. Linux works OOTB on pretty much all hardware, often better than Windows since it ships with all of the necessary drivers. >to claim it can replace Win10 for the average user is a stretch The average user can handle KDE Plasma just fine.

> Consider yourself told, then. Oh, please enlighten me, Drew. > Linux works OOTB on pretty much all hardware, often better than Windows Are device manufacturers supporting Linux? > since it ships with all of the necessary drivers. No it doesn't, last time I checked to even get the recommended usb wifi module to work on Arch required downloading additional packages and compiling a kernel module. > The average user ca…

Cool let me know how you handle explaining why they can't run some exe they downloaded on your GNU/Linux setup, and when they complain that they're used to Microsoft Word not this LibreOffice stuff.

Mac users don't seem to have these problems.

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