I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10 • Hacker News Board

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#211

Post by snoman » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 8:11 PM UTC

api wrote: post #195

vlunkr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The advanced features just couldn't work without it." I don't know much about Windows 10, so I'm curious what features you are referring to that require heavy tracking like this.

We had speech recognition back in the 1990s on computers less powerful than a Raspberry Pi V1. We're talking 200-400mhz 32-bit Intel boxes. So yes, the cloud dependency is very dubious. If leveraging a lot of data allows for better speech recognition, why can't your computer access a remote speech recognition data set that stores and shares the results of its machine learning algorithms rather than uploading actual a…

Not sure if you're being facetious or not but if you were right then we would just do it on our existing phones now.

In the 90s we had slow voice recognition that took a long time to train, that would only ever work for a single user, in a silent room... If it worked at all... Which wasn't very common.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#212

Post by freehunter » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 8:12 PM UTC

iambitjelly wrote: post #92

chadzawistowski wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do start menu ads look like?

This: https://twitter.com/GazTheJourno/status/626736454610366465 According to these screen shots, this guy got skincare product ads in his start menu. I can't verify because I noped out of anything that smelled like ads right from the get-go. Also, classic shell. !!!EDIT: I know it looks shopped, which is why I said I couldn't verify it. Windows Store app ads are quite real though.

If you know it's fake, why would you bother posting it or even bringing it up?

"Its awesome living in a mansion! According to this picture, this is what my mansion looks like"

"!!!EDIT: I know I don't own a mansion, but other people do and this is what it would look like if I had one."

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#213

Post by mappu » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 8:12 PM UTC

Hijacking this thread - if anyone used the official media creation tool to get a x86_64 Professional ISO, can you please post MD5/SHA1 hashes? Mine don't match anything on google.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#214

Post by urda » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 8:12 PM UTC

djloche wrote: post #156

Wi-Fi Sense is a huge security hole, and even if you don't have windows 10, if anyone you trust with access to your network upgrades to windows 10, that person becomes a security problem for you. Obvious solution is to use a strong generated string for your password (so even if they get your password, they're not getting the password to anything else), and then configure your router to require each device connecting…

You're just wasting your energy if you setup MAC Whitelisting and think that's going to help at all with security.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#215

Post by mc808 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 8:13 PM UTC

Besides the fact that you can't turn off automatic updates (which makes Windows little more than a zombie node in Microsoft's vast botnet), the default setting is also to "send updates to ... PCs on my local network, and PCs on the Internet." Similar for the defaults in Windows Defender.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#216

Post by systemz » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 8:13 PM UTC

Microsoft can't lock-in user to OS because most of the apps are now multiplatform so they are locking-in to their services and profiting from big data.

EU will take a look on those practices soon :)

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#217

Post by thwest » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 8:13 PM UTC

api wrote: post #195

vlunkr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The advanced features just couldn't work without it." I don't know much about Windows 10, so I'm curious what features you are referring to that require heavy tracking like this.

We had speech recognition back in the 1990s on computers less powerful than a Raspberry Pi V1. We're talking 200-400mhz 32-bit Intel boxes. So yes, the cloud dependency is very dubious. If leveraging a lot of data allows for better speech recognition, why can't your computer access a remote speech recognition data set that stores and shares the results of its machine learning algorithms rather than uploading actual a…

Do you remember how much training time you had to spend on Dragon Naturally Speaking?

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#218

Post by urda » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 8:14 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #197

blkhp19 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they spy on you? There's no suspicious network traffic leaving my Mac. They might collect info about Siri queries or downloaded apps, but they're certainly not logging keystrokes from OS X or iOS.

I think you're assuming they're doing something they're not. Microsoft is capturing text input and handwriting from touch input interfaces the same way Google's Android keyboard , Swype, or Swift Key do to improve predictive input, spelling correction/suggestions, personal dictionaries etc. Remember Windows 10 is touch enabled operating system like iOS or Android. I'm not as familiar with the Apple Keyboard but I wou…

I think you're reading way too much into all of that, attempting to make a mountain out of a molehill just to prove an imaginary point.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#219

Post by api » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 8:16 PM UTC

frogpelt wrote: post #43

People want to be connected, join social networks, download apps, be able to control their appliances from across the ocean, carry devices loaded with sensors everywhere they go--and on top of all it, they want privacy. These are fun and interesting times.

It could be done, but it would require a lot of hefty cryptography-centered engineering to implement zero-knowledge data sharing schemes, etc.

Who's going to pay for that?

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#220

Post by freehunter » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 8:16 PM UTC

bhauer wrote: post #187

slg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the resource costs would be too high to really make that worthwhile. The choice is probably between bad privacy settings, a bad personal assistant, or bad battery life and disk usage. Microsoft chose the option that would likely upset the smallest group of people.

I don't buy it. My Windows 10 machines will be Ivy Bridge, Broadwell, and soon Skylake-powered desktop processors running with gobs of excess computing capacity. Voice recognition should be feasible with this hardware, as it has been in the past with Windows 7 and Windows 8's often-ignored voice transcription feature. Furthermore, even if the performance were slightly worse, I would gladly sacrifice some performance…

You know they sell things like the Surface 3 using an Intel i3 processor, and still sell Windows tablets with Atom processors, right? Just because you have a 12-core i7 with 320GB of RAM doesn't mean every Windows machine does.