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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

#61
post #60

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…

Yep. All of the Windows machines that I actually rely on for work—the ones that I need to be able to start up and immediately use, and need to be able to trust them to keep running without interruption or regression—are completely firewalled off from the public internet, so that they are secure both from malware, and unwanted updates. The rest of my work is done on other, more obedient operating systems. Windows 95 w…

My beef is that Microsoft created an update always culture (a good thing), but they are now “extending” the practice in ways that don’t reflect a customers best interest.

The future, which is subscription models with limited time away from activation servers, breaks your needs fundamentally.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#63

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 [...] 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.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling users to disable updates it's not a good recommendation.

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 you?

From my experience as someone who has had 0 problems since beta (that weren't caused by me doing something stupid like uninstalling Windows Store) people mess with windows, usually by running a script or 2 because "omg Microsoft is spying on me!111!" then the update comes and throws them an error or 2.

Choose any other OS. Any OS at all that is sufficiently complicated as to compete with Windows (maybe as a starting point anything a tiny bit more complicated than ChromeOS). Then name a problem that's happened with Windows 10. I'll show something similar if not worse happening on the other OS you've chosen.

The problem, IMO, isn't the OS. It's the freedom the OS allows and the billions of different configurations you'll find out there. Of course any 1 update isn't going to account for all of that. Hell Apple can't even do it on iphones/imacs and they have a very tiny number of SKUs to deal with.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#65
post #38

Did they find something that contradicts stuff listed at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/ ?

Are you really expecting anybody to waste time reading either of the reports when that time can be utilized spreading FUD against Microsoft? EDIT: On second thoughts, given that the M$ Windoze avoiders haven't shot this post up to 800 points, its probably nothing scandalous.

Nobody would need to read any reports if Microsoft respected customers by making telemetry opt-in.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it.

Windows 10, spying on its user, is malware.

A domain like 'microsft.com' is used to trick users into thinking the communication is legitimate and to Microsoft. But why would the actual Microsoft need to engage in this?

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#68

to be fair every OS can and does do telemetry, say nothing about each software application calling back home in a similar way - such feedback helps speed up improvements however linux OS makes explicit notice of this and its simple to disable

There is 0 opt-out telemetry in most (all?) major flavors of Linux.

But there's an even more important issue here. Even if there were some form of telemetry in Linux you'd be able to see exactly what it's collecting and where it's sending it since the OS itself is open source. I do not think many people are mostly okayish with purely diagnostic telemetry, but it's not clear exactly what Microsoft is collecting and their transition to a sort of 'free to play' style of OS does not lead one to the most optimistic views for either the type data they're harvesting, or their intended use for such data.

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#69
post #38

Did they find something that contradicts stuff listed at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/ ?

Are you really expecting anybody to waste time reading either of the reports when that time can be utilized spreading FUD against Microsoft? EDIT: On second thoughts, given that the M$ Windoze avoiders haven't shot this post up to 800 points, its probably nothing scandalous.

We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and flamey comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

#70
post #6

I wish all governments did audits like this. Either the software would get less invasive, or we'd see Linux everywhere, wins all around. How bad is it that not even governments can use windows without the data vacuum being turned on? And they need to commission these investigations to even figure out what that means?

Well there's other issues with Linux on the desktop that doesn't let anybody except developers use it productively.

You always have to weight your priorities, and getting stuff done is often number one priority.

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