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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

#201

Post by flukus »

anticensor wrote: post #155
userbinator wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also dropped a seemingly random-named tool/service ("sedlauncher" and I think "sedsvc") in "C:\Program Files\rempl" ...and they didn't even bother to check that there's an existing project of that name (which will only serve to scare those who come across it by searching --- the description begins "Platform for moderated remote access "...): https://github.com/rempl/rempl It also randomly creates a new service m…

No one forced you to use Windows 10. You could have used ReactOS.

Are you forgetting how MS forced a lot of happy win 7/8 users to upgrade by abusing windows update?

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#202

Post by flukus »

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.

If users are not willing to face some discomfort then they're welcome to keep getting abused by MS like this, as there is no disincentive not to.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#203

Post by Sylos »

hyperman1 wrote: post #187
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. :)

Unfortunately, Word is light-years behind any alternative, open source or not. Styling is a half-assed inconsistent mess. Bullet indentation jumps around like crazy. Changing your default printer might cause reformatting. There is no decent separation between content and formatting. The menu ^h^h^h^h^h^h ribbon is such a mess you need a search function. Word is the kind of product that should be taken out and shot. I…

> BTW, while Gimp is not a photoshop replacement (please fix the window behaviour, guys)

If you mean the multi-window behaviour, as of 2.10 the default is now set to single-window.

If you don't have 2.10 in your distro yet, you can toggle that on in the menubar: Windows -> Single-Window Mode

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#204

Post by brokenmachine »

kakarot wrote: post #119
einr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ableton is literally the only thing keeping me tied to Windows. Also I don't like Apple with all their user-hostility, so I'm not sure what I'll do later.

I don't want to dual-boot. I investigated running Ableton in a VM but I'm just not convinced it'd work well, Linux support for audio is so flaky, I can't believe it'd handle low-latency ASIO stuff.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#205

Post by kakarot »

brokenmachine wrote: post #204
kakarot wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ableton is literally the only thing keeping me tied to Windows. Also I don't like Apple with all their user-hostility, so I'm not sure what I'll do later. I don't want to dual-boot. I investigated running Ableton in a VM but I'm just not convinced it'd work well, Linux support for audio is so flaky, I can't believe it'd handle low-latency ASIO stuff.

I use Ableton in a VM and it works great, but I wouldn't use it for live performances just to be sure. I haven't 100% eliminated all crackling yet. If I had more cores and moved Windows to a separate SSD, then I think that would completely get rid of crackling. Crackling only happens because of DPC latency, cache misses, or heavy write operations outside of the VM.

I pass through a dedicated ASIO-compatible soundcard, dedicated GPU and dedicated USB controller which takes care of most of the DPC latency and latencies due to USB host translation.

I lock down my cores in such a way that Windows has access to three physical cores and my host machine has access to only one. They don't share. This heavily reduces CPU cache misses.

I use hugetables to prevent memory-related issues. Though that's more for gaming.

There are a bunch more tiny optimizations I've made that also contribute to its viability.

My latency is just about as good as it's going to get with Windows vs Mac.

Happy to help you achieve a similar setup.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#207

Post by heybrendan »

jlgaddis wrote: post #97
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…

If you put in a block for *.akadns.net you will very likely experience quite a bit of collateral damage. A lot of large, popular companies use Akamai. Likewise, Ii you drop all traffic from and to those CIDR ranges, well, I hope you don't use any services or sites that are hosted on Azure.

Excellent point, and I'm well aware. Vigilance (and a proactive security posture) are the price of privacy--and I suspect nothing of actual value will be lost.

It's preferable (to me) to blacklist /everything/ and deal with any future connectivity issues on a case-by-case basis.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#208

Post by ernst_klim »

thepp1983 wrote: post #143
ernst_klim wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why doesn't by usb headset work? >The only thing I haven't had work is some cheapo chinese Serial PCI card from fleabay. You are contradicting yourself here. Besides, linux hardware support is incredible nowadays, and most of the time if you have problems with linux, you would have them with windows as well (aka, oem drivers for crappy nonstandard custom hardware). Nowadays most of the soundcards, gamepads, headsets…

> You are contradicting yourself here. No I am not. I was just saying that the only thing I've hadn't have work out of the box was some dodgy PCI card from China. It is literally the only thing in the last ten years that wasn't a video card that didn't work out of the box for me. > Besides, linux hardware support is incredible nowadays, and most of the time if you have problems with linux, you would have them with wi…

You confuse your subjective experience with the overall picture. The list of devices which kernel does support is not only incredible, but higher than that of any other OS safe Windows maybe. And even in windows you will have pretty the same hardware problems, just with the different set of hardware, which you were lucky to avoid. Shit like this [1] [2] is pretty common in windows world as well.

>The touchpad and touchscreen don't work during install, so you'll need to plug in a mouse or fuss with keyboard-only navigation. After installation you'll only have 2.4GHz wifi, so you'll need to install the Lenovo driver. There are probably other Lenovo drivers that will be required - but I haven't taken the experiment any farther yet.

>Intel GMA 910 and 915 series released in 2004 and 2005 respectively didn't get WDDM driver which means they only work with Windows XP, Vista and 7

Most of the time you just have an OEM preinstalled for you or even an OS preinstalled on a very particular hardware (macos).

[1] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-Yoga-Series-Notebooks/Yo...

[2] https://communities.intel.com/thread/123273

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#209

Post by ragequitta »

BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #112
ragequitta wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use O&O shutup 10 to shut down cortana, telemetry, and other minor annoyances (mostly because I like video games). Maybe that's why it's been so smooth?

And rebooting every other week? You mean on a very regular and predictable monthly schedule that was around for years prior to Windows 10's release? Not really a problem in my eyes. On my personal computer I shut it down nightly because it takes roughly 5 seconds to boot a computer these days. I can't even remember the last time I was aware an update happened.

The one problem I DID have that I was about to hate on Microsoft for was a flashing taskbar. Turns out it was entirely my fault for using a 3rd party junk program.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#210

Post by ragequitta »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #133
ragequitta wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. And if you read past the headline you find out that they had numerous other problems with their security practices that were actually responsible for them being compromised, because if…

I agree with the sentiment that "everything is bad". Computers are still in their birthing stage and full of problems. But Windows 10 feels like an improvement over any previous version of Windows at least. Which is really all we can ask for. A little too transitional/work in progress for some, I can see that (2 control panels? madness!), but otherwise pretty smooth.

But maybe it's also because I left computer support type roles and I haven't seen the nightmares like I did with XP/2000/Vista/7. But as an end user/casual security and IT watcher I can't complain too much (yet).

And as an anecdote the only problem I've had updating was the one large change to the audio stack they did (and needed to do-it's so much better). The huge issue that arose was I needed to unmute my headphones. Other than that I seriously have not noticed any update other than maybe seeing the % when I boot up in the morning. I keep track of when the big ones come so I can run O&O after those, but I really haven't even skipped a beat due to an update.

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